Frequently Asked Questions
Last.fm stores raw text strings. We map those strings to the MusicBrainz database to provide accurate track lengths, release years, and artist countries. If a scrobble isn't matched yet, it won't appear in your stats. We're always working to map your scrobbles so you should see your mapped bar slowly rise as we find connections! You can use the Manual Matcher tool to manually match scrobbles that failed to map automatically.
Currently, we take the top 100 played unmapped tracks across our entire database and attempt to find a match on Musicbrainz.
MusicBrainz limits API requests to 1 per second. Since we're always trying to map scrobbles behind the scenes, we use a weighted queue to enforce the 1 second rate. This means that each check to Musicbrainz is waiting in this queue. User requests get pushed to the front of the queue because you all are VIPs! However, you do have to wait for each other. This limit ensures that no one person can hog up all of our API requests as well as ensuring that our background checker still has time in a day to process scrobbles.
We perform an incremental sync every time you visit the dashboard. This fetches your most recent plays. A Complete Sync is only necessary if you've edited older scrobbles directly on Last.fm. You can also manually recheck single last.fm scrobble pages using the Scrobble Browser for a faster sync if you know remember which scrobbles you edited from which days.
Our genres are a blend of Rate Your Music genre taxonomy and their community voting concept except housed within this app. We do offer suggested genres, which are based off of last.fm tags matching RYM genres when there is no community vote. If you see an album with the wrong genre, feel free to use the voting buttons/input on the Album page to help improve the library!
Calculating All Time stats on very large accounts is a heavy lift. On some of our older accounts with a lot of scrobbles, users may experience some substantial lag when exploring their all time stats on the dashboard. Sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to load. We offer two different modes to view your data depending on your preference:
Again, this only impacts the All Time range.
- Accuracy Mode (Default): This scans your enitre scrobble history in real-time. It is the most accurate way to see recent plays and includes every single track, but it can be slower for large libraries.
- Speed Mode (⚡): This uses a "Pre-Calculated" snapshot of your library that updates every hour. It is nearly instant but might not show scrobbles that were mapped, synced, or scrobbled in the last 60 minutes.
Again, this only impacts the All Time range.
To capture the true evolution of this community, periodic charts (Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly) and the billboards are based on your join date. This means they only count music listened to while you were a member. All Time charts does not follow this and uses the Speed Mode approach of using our pre-calculated stats that update hourly.
In order to greatly improve load times, we use an hourly updating artist credit constructor that allows us to build out the dynamic credits with flags and links. If a page is missing an artist credit, please check back in a little bit to see the fixed version.
When importing from Last.fm, we only store one scrobble per timestamp per user. Aka, we won't store a scrobble that exists at the exact same timestamp down to the milliseconds (or however precise Last.fm is). There are some cases where Last.fm somehow stores two scrobbles at the exact same time. Unfortunately we can only take one and thus the other is lost. This is not a common issue but it does happen.