Last.fm misspellings

Hello.
I’m new to MusicBrainz and Last.fm. My problem is about duplicate tracks on Last.fm. I read that Last.fm’s database is from MusicBrainz. An example is the track [Esta Cobardia] by Julio Iglesias. The correct Spanish spelling is [Esta Cobardía] with [í]. I’m getting duplicate scrobbles because on Spotify it is [Esta Cobardia], while on my local music player it is with [í]. Does adding aliases to the MusicBrainz database fixex same track with different spelling on Last.fm immediately or should I do something else to merge the two tracks as one to prevent messed up scrobbles? I’ve already submitted an alias and waiting for votes.

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Last.fm will get whatever track name you have set in your file tags.
Once you have submitted scrobbles as Title A, it cannot be merged with scrobbles for Title B.

Update

But when your playing file contains a recording MBID (or track MBID?) among its tags, then your scrobbles for this file will be dynamically renamed each time the MB recording (or track?) is later renamed in MB.
Or is it only valid for ListenBrainz?

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I think that level of renaming post-scrobble is exclusive to ListenBrainz. The Last.FM API allows ingestion of an MBID via track.scrobble, but it’s optional, and up to the client whether they provide it or not (API Docs | Last.fm).

@AbdBa21 do you know the application name of player you are using to scrobble local plays to Last.FM?

I’m using BlackPlayer on Android. Last.fm reads the exact tag with [í]. Let’s say I used AIMP on Windows and scrobbeled the exact same track, it would also scrobble it with [í] I got lost in your reply because I’m a beginner. Can you please explan? Thanks in advance.

I didn’t see an MBID tag in the MP3 file. But the last.fm scrobbler on Android is so basic that it only scrobbles throught the notifications. So I don’t think that might work. Forget merging my previous scrobbles. Can I merge the track in the database or edit it for last.fm? Or is it more complicated?

You can edit the scrobble on Last.FM if you have a pro account. Seems like a pretty common occurrence with accented characters: The same name, but different scrobbles - Get Help - Last.fm Support Community

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You can remove your bad scrobbles, then listen to your good tracks. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

Oh never thought of that. Thank you so much. But that would mean rescroblling the wanted track like 50 times. But my point was that I want to scrobble flawlessly whether it was from my local Android music player or Spotify on PC. Also I wanted to merge the tracks in the database. Let’s say everyone has a favorite artist, he/she has time to correct the database if it was wrong.

Nah, I can’t do any purchase from the country I’m in. Even Spotify is blocked and Last.fm Android client is also blocked (which confuses me, because I can access the site without any VPN, the app just crashes without a VPN) Thanks for the suggestion.

Ah, yeah, that’s a rough situation to be in. If you’re not set on using Last.FM and just want to track your play counts, you could give ListenBrainz a try? You can even import your Last.FM play counts, so you wouldn’t be starting over from scratch: Importing Data - ListenBrainz

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Is last.fm still pulling data from MB?

I thought they changed that - but it’s been a while since I was on there.

I really want to try. But unfortunately, using fm bot on Discord in one of the servers.

Where else could it pull data from?

I had a little look and:

https://support.last.fm/t/how-are-artist-and-other-catalogue-pages-created/410
It looks like last.fm imports their release data from a bunch of places, including Discogs and MusicBrainz, but also the streaming platforms proper, like Spotify Bandcamp etc

Not sure what this means, but presumably if it was imported from Spotify etc then editing it on MB won’t do anything.

https://support.last.fm/t/what-are-the-guidelines-for-correcting-artist-and-track-names/197
Last.fm uses MB guidelines for stuff but currently ‘cannot make corrections to their data at this time’ (from 2019 but couldn’t see any updates)

https://support.last.fm/t/how-do-i-report-a-release-thats-incorrect-or-missing-from-the-catalogue/211
This ‘how to report incorrect releases’ faq page manages to not mention anything about the topic :thinking:

Maybe @Bloopy has more insight?

My feeling for a long time is that last.fm is a bit of a sinking ship, definitely looking forward to ListenBrainz getting more features.


btw: last I knew a lot of the last.fm song pages are created on their first scrobble, and it saves the caps from that first scrobble. So wEiRd caps gets stuck in their system. It may be the same with accents, it might be unrelated to where they imported the data from. Again, unsure these days sorry.

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If the fmbot on Discord is your primary use case, you may be in luck. It sounds like the bot developer is interested in integrating ListenBrainz functionality at some point: (Support for Last.fm alternatives · Issue #122 · fmbot-discord/fmbot · GitHub).

Rounding out the data source question: @aerozol is correct in that Last.FM pulls (scrapes) data from multiple sources throughout the week. From what I have seen, this is primarily for data they (Last.FM) do not have yet. However, a submission (listen/scrobble) from a user will create the track page in their system if it does not exist yet, and is completely separate from anything MusicBrainz would supply.

To your specific example though, the data submitted by your client is where the i vs. í issue stems from. I know you mentioned the Android client you’re using is just pulling from the system notification, which may be doing a character substitution (converting the accented character to a plain “i”. At that point, from my understanding, it is not an issue of another data source intervening. Last.FM is just reading what the client told it, and scrobbling it verbatim.

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I have a hunch Last.fm pulled some data from Amazon or something like that as well. Only because when I released an album, Amazon was basically the only place that displayed the release date in advance. Then Last.fm started showing one too, but their system had applied a timezone “correction” so the release date of my album is wrong on there. :man_facepalming: Last.fm doesn’t make use of MB aliases as far as I’ve ever heard.

I find Last.fm Pro very worthwhile for the scrobble editing feature alone. I don’t scrobble from Spotify, but if you do there’s a checkbox to apply your edit “to all new scrobbles of this track” - so you only have to edit a scrobble once and then your future Spotify plays of that song are correct too. I could be wrong, but I imagine your account keeps those settings even if you only pay for one month and then let your Pro status lapse.

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