Can someone please help me with this?

[johnnynuxxx]

I have MB and it works flawlessly, except for one thing. It does not correctly sync the correct number of plays from Last.fm for certain songs, and I cannot figure out why. For most songs it works fine, but some it is way way off. I understand some of it. I have changed some of the album names, such as greatest hits albums to the album the original album the song appeared on. I understand that, and it will be an easy fix once I upgrade to Pro on Last.fm. According to MB, these are my top songs by Playcount, followed by the number of scrobbles on Last.fm, and yes, I have tried to sync the Playcounts many times. Again, for the majority of songs, this feature works fine. Here are some of the worst examples.

1. Styx - Suite Madame Blue from Equiinox. MB has 346 plays. LFM has 184, which is the correct number. There are no other versions of this song on my MB.
2. Kraftwerk vs Coldplay - Computer Talk (mashup). MB has 272 plays. LFM has 90, which is correct.
3. The Who - We're Not Gonna Take it. MB 262 plays. LFM 101 plays.
4. Tears For Fears - Mad World. MB 231 plays. LFM 223 plays. The catch on this one is that there were two remixed versions which I have deleted on MB. Some of the album names are the remixed versions.
5. The Killers - Mr. Brightside. MB 219 plays. LFM 137 plays.

I saw in another post that these could be duplicate scrobbles in a cached folder appdata, however I could not find this folder anywhere in MB.

Thanks in advance for anyone who knows how to fix this.

[Steven]

If the song is <= 30 secs or is not in any library/inbox then its not synced
also check the last.fm plugin settings to make sure you havent set any excluded folders

What version of MB are you using. I have a vague recollection that older versions didnt update a count if MB had a greater count

[johnnynuxxx]

Version 3.2.6902

There are some bits in my music library, mostly quotes from movies and TV shows. Most are under 30 seconds.

I have just under 25k files in my music library, not huge but certainly rather large. These songs are from every genre and era. I am approaching 1 million scrobbles on Last.fm. I would like to try to fix the playcounts, and also update all of the music files before reaching that milestone.

My computer runs 24/7 and MB is active most of the time. I use the AutoDJ feature and it randomly selects which songs to play. I have a folder which controls how often songs are played based on their rating and playcount. If a song has been overplayed it doesn't get played that often, or maybe not at all for lower rated songs. This has the advantage that recent downloads are placed in heavy rotation until they "catch" up with the older songs in terms of playcount.

I'll try to do an update, but I'm not sure how. I just hope that an update doesn't undo all the work I did. I have thousands of hours invested in keeping my digital music collection accurate.

There is one additional thing. I remember a few years back, I deleted all of the excess plays of certain songs. The reason I did that is because I have several versions of certain songs, live versions, remixes, singles/album versions etc. and the playcounts were getting way out of hand with songs that had only one or two versions. That's when I started to give each version of a song a unique name. That process is complete because there are no duplicates, but I would actually like to retrieve all of the plays that I deleted previously. I think I read somewhere that Last.fm doesn't totally delete them. I was thinking maybe I can get them back. That may explain the difference in a song like Suite Madame Blue, but not the Computer Talk mashup, which was added well after the time when I deleted the excess scrobbles.

Thanks for responding to my post.

[phred]

Version 3.2.6902

Not quite four years old. Updating to at least 3.4 (3.5 recommended) will probably solve your last.fm issue.

[johnnynuxxx]

How do I do the update? Can I just click on the download page above and click on the Music Bee Installer? It doesn't say update and I'm worried it won't transfer my file information.

[johnnynuxxx]

I did the update and the problem has not been resolved. Thanks for the suggestion. At least I have the latest version. I might submit an error report.

[frankz]

It's just going to keep rewriting the same flawed information every time you sync play counts unless you delete the file /%AppData%/InternalCache/LastFmPlayCountCache.dat before you sync.

[Steven]

to add to frankz answer, you normally would only need to delete that file once to force a resync

[johnnynuxxx]

I searched for the appdata file on c drive and got nothing. I cannot find this folder on my computer.

I got a new computer in October 2020. Can't remember how I got MB on to the new comp, don't see the installation files or anything. One thing I did do on 10/31/2020, I downloaded .csv files of every download up to that point.

In the case of Styx - Suite Madame Blue, it looks like I deleted everything without a timestamp. It does have 346 plays in Last.fm. I don't know if I can restore those deleted plays or not. I can't remember if I deleted them in late 2020 or not. They may be recorded in the appdata file, if I could find it and delete it.

In the case of the Kraftwerk vs Coldplay mashup, there were no deleted files without a timestamp. I downloaded the song 5 years ago in 2017, and it's been played about 15 times a year, for 74 plays total. I have no idea why Last.fm has 272 plays.

The Who - We're Not Gonna Take it is much like Styx. Looks as if I deleted everything without a timestamp.

Tears For Fears - The Hurting. Looks like the difference with this one is because I had a couple garbage remixes which I deleted at some point. Since the remixes no longer exist, Last.fm must have credited all plays to the original.

The Killers - Mr. Brightside. Must have deleted everything without a timestamp.

Ok to sum it up, this is why there are differences in most of the playcounts. Deleting the appdata file may solve most of the problem, but the problem is, I can't find it, even when I search the entire C drive. There isn't even a folder called appdata. Any suggestions?

[johnnynuxxx]

Update: Ok I figured it out. Thanks to all of you. It works perfectly now. The problem is that now I have 25k songs to modify. Many songs in my library have different album names, and I want to go in and make sure the album names match. It's a daunting task. I want the playcount in my MB library to match the playcount in last.fm. Thanks again.

[frankz]

Be aware that if you scrobble something and then change the display artist, title or album title in Musicbee, that file will (based on my observations) no longer be a match when you sync your play counts back to MB.

From what I can tell the stats on last.fm itself only look at artist and title.

So for example if I listen to "Oh, Darling! - The Beatles - Abbey Road" and then "Oh, Darling! - The Beatles - Abbey Road [2019 Super Deluxe]", the play counts in MB will be one play each (as they should be) and on last.fm it will show two listens for Oh, Darling!.

MusicBee looks for exact matches, last.fm just looks for the same song by the same artists.  To the best of my knowledge.

[johnnynuxxx]

Yes, I had already realized this some time ago. One thing I did was to create a unique name for every song in my music library, unless they were by different artists. That solves part of the problem, but if the songs were scrobbled under a different album name in the past, those plays will not show up in MB. So, I have to go back in LFM and edit every song. If the album name is blank, or it was scrobbled under a different album name, they need to be changed. It's a daunting task that will take years to complete. I'm starting with the songs that have the highest number of plays. Most of the time, I have to analyze the scrobbles to determine which version of the song each scrobble should be assigned to. Sometimes they're blank, especially for songs which were scrobbled before I started adding in album names. In that case I generally assign the scrobbles to the standard or hit version, unless it is obvious that there are an unusually high number of plays for that version. Even though I have nearly 25k songs in my music library, a lot of it is junk. I want to get rid of maybe 5k songs, most of which have zero plays. If I can do 200 songs a week, I can get it done in 2 years.

Thanks again for your help.