Many of us are scrobbling our Roon plays to Last.fm. There is even a topic for sharing your Last.fm profile (Share your Last.fm profile!). The is also a feature request for Roon to be able to scrobble directly to ListenBrainz. (Listenbrainz scrobbler). But did you know that ListenBrainz can actually sync your listening history from Last.fm? And the beauty of it is that it will allow you to grab all your history, so you’re not starting from scratch.
I had two reasons for enabling this:
It’s sort of a backup of my play history in Last.fm
ListenBrainz offers nice dashboards, that provide other insights than Last.fm.
I was asked by @terzinator to create a basic how to for setting this up, so hear it goes:
If you don’t have an account, create one. It’s free. Note that if you have a MusicBrainz account, you can use that on ListenBrainz as well.
Once you’re logged it, click “Settings”, and select “Connected Services” from the settings menu. (It’s the first one in the list)
Scroll down the page until you come across the Last.fm section.
Enter your Last.fm username in the corresponding field.
Leave the “Start Import From” unless you wish to import only a part of your listening history
Finally click “Connect to Last.FM”.
Wait until the sync completes. Depending on the amount tracks you have in Last.fm this could take some time. When I started this I only had about a year’s worth of scrobbles, and took a few minutes.
That’s all there is to it.
New scrobbles are typically synced within a couple of minutes, and stats are updated periodically.
Thanks Sven, I assume this keeps it updated as well? (I will be testing it later if I get a chance)
I have been using last.fm since 2008 and have a lot of data in there, so having a backup feels like a good idea. I have also been a paying subscriber to their pro service for several years.
It does keep updating. Sometimes there’s a short delay, but eventually it does catch up. During the time I’ve been using this I once noticed that it was way off, but they run a full sync every now and then, so it does correct itself. It’s pretty much set and forget.
My data took a couple of hours to sync across from last.fm, which is nothing in the scheme of things, but a small investment all the same. But sync it did.
For anybody who is wondering about supplanting last.fm for this… I like the heat map, and I really like the genuine era counts. The tracks are considered off the original release, rather than the (many) compilations I (are forced to) use.
Also the benefit of having a backup database to those lavishly curated scrobbles won’t hurt, as Michael already noted.
As backup is concerned it’s always been something that has worried me about last.fm having all my play history in one place. It is closing in towards 20 years of playing history and it is probably at about 80% accurate as well.
I can confirm that it caught up overnight and that it will probably always be a few hours behind last.fm and I will be making an annual donation for this nice service
They do eventually get updated. Typically on a daily basis, although I have seen that my all time stats have occasionally lagged behind a couple of days.
last.fm has a huge free tier. This freeware could use some love, but $50 does seem an awful lot.
Maybe $2-monthly for me, but given processing fee/s I might shoot for annual too.
tracks in as well 
