I started using Last.fm again today and I noticed that my initial import of my iTunes library was incorrect. I gave it some time, knowing that Last.fm sometimes has issues with counting and its numbers, and they were still incorrect. Upon further investigation, I noticed that the play counts matched those of an old iTunes library, one stored in ~/Music/iTunes Music Library.xml, while my actual library resides in ~/Music/iTunes Library.xml and ~/Music/iTunes Library.itl. Last.fm for Mac (at the time of writing) uses the incorrect iTunes files for its import. This results in either old, incorrect play counts (if the incorrect file exists) or absolutely no importing at all, resulting in no play counts being uploaded to Last.fm (this happened after I removed the old file, hoping Last.fm would detect the correct, new file and use it; it didn’t). Checking the console, it is found that Last.fm searches for iTunes Music Library.xml, even when newer iTunes versions use iTunes Library.xml. Apple makes it clear on their website that this is the proper filename, Last.fm just hasn’t updated their software accordingly.

Screen Shot 2013-08-05 at 11.11.46 PM

The Last.fm desktop client’s GitHub repository is rather disorganized, so I decided it wasn’t worth all the trouble to make a pull request fixing this.

Additional information: Last.fm for Mac (latest version, official, downloaded today, reinstalled multiple times) on OS X 10.8.3.