I think I've unlocked a new level of autism or something.
I can't scrobble from our phone because we're using a Xiaomi Redmi running Miui 12.5. For those who have no idea what that means, it's basically the singular phone running system that kills all background processes no matter how hard you try. You cannot use any sort of scrobbling apps on this phone. It's notorious. I tried like 4 apps, one of which wasn't even available on the Play Store, I had to get it from a third-party site (always scan your third-party apps kids). Nada.
But being the statistics and music obsessed autism creature I am, I had to figure out a way to do it. Luckily, I use VLC media player, and although it doesn't have an integration with Last.fm, it does keep a media history. I have to go into the advanced settings and choose to copy ("dump") the media database onto our phone, then transfer it to our laptop so we can read the database file, then edit the table to add two extra columns and get them to reference other tables in order to get the necessary data.
Of course, there's is still the small issue of getting the data to Last.fm in any recognisable form. That's where yet another piece of software comes in, Strawberry music player. That does have an integration with Last.fm, and one you can edit, in the form of its offline cache log file (it saves songs you've played while offline and sends them later).
So what I did was write a formula into Google Sheets (took me about 3 days to perfect because Strawberry is FUSSY), create a table on the sheet for the required data, copy and paste all required data from the media database into the table, copy the formula output into the cache log file, clean it up (because copying from Google Sheets adds extra quotation marks for some reason), and then open Strawberry music player for about 3 to 5 seconds and close it. Repeat for every 50 songs because that's the API batch submission limit (so about 4 to 6 times).
And just because I'm a stickler for accuracy and I use two different tagging software between our laptop and our phone, I also go through all the submitted Scrobbles with the pano scrobbler app and edit the data if it's not right.
So yeah. TLDR: I created a 12-step system to solve my scrobble FOMO.
