New Last.fm protocol

[Casey Link]

I talked to a Max H (mxcl) of last.fm.. whose also a former amarok dev
(developer emeritus as described by sebr), about adding a lot of the
official client features into amarok2. This is his response (sent with
permission).

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The new scrobbling protocol is out. I already made the new scrobbler
code in the client a drop-in-replacement with the goal of adding it to
amarok 2 myself. Please feel free to check out the latest source code
and copy Scrobbler-1.2.* over :)

You'll need to trim TrackInfo.h and cpp a little from libUnicorn or
libMoose I forget.

Be sure to get the 1.4 beta source, if it's not available, and I'm not
sure if it is, I can make you a tarball.

The scrobbling protocol is documented at audioscrobbler.net, the radio
architecture is not documented, since we don't really want third party
radio apps. And I say really meaning, please go ahead, we love it, but
it's not officially supported.

The new radio architecture is tentatively named "2.0" and requires the
client to scrobble the radio too.

The new scrobbler has a number of caveats. Skips are scrobbled. Loves
and scrobbled. Bans are scrobbled. It is a basic requirement for
amarok to do this properly. We need the data for our stats and we need
the stats to qualify for streaming the music in the first place. If
amarok didn't scrobble properly we'd eventually notice and help you
fix the code, so don't worry about it, but I have to emphasise its
importance :)

Tagging etc. is easy. You can grab the source for our web request
architecture from libUnicorn/libMoose. The request object is
TagRequest I believe.

Max
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After some hunting here are the resources Max is referring to.

The 1.4 Beta: http://cdn.last.fm/client/src/last.fm-1.4.0.53395.src.tar.bz2
Where updates are posted:
http://www.last.fm/group/Audioscrobbler+Beta/forum/30705/_/348752

He doesn't mention this, but we should recognize MBIDs and scrobble
them. See this bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122281

Once this all gets implemented.... it will be really awesome :D

Ramblurr