panobble

A minimal MPRIS → Last.fm scrobbler daemon for Linux, porting the scrobbling core of pano-scrobbler: its metadata cleanup (YouTube title parsing, remaster/explicit stripping, user regex rules), scrobble timing rules, and offline queue — without the GUI.

Install

go build -o ~/.local/bin/panobble ./cmd/panobble

Setup

1. Create a Last.fm API account: https://www.last.fm/api/account/create
2. Copy contrib/config.example.toml to ~/.config/panobble/config.toml and fill in api_key / api_secret.
3. Log in (opens a browser): panobble auth
4. Discover your players and add them to [players].allowed: panobble players
5. Run it: panobble daemon — or install the systemd user unit:

cp contrib/panobble.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user enable --now panobble

Commands

command
panobble daemon	run the scrobbler in the foreground
panobble auth	log in to Last.fm
panobble players	list current MPRIS players and their config ids
panobble parse [--host H] ARTIST TITLE [ALBUM]	dry-run the cleanup pipeline
panobble pending [--flush]	list / submit queued offline scrobbles
panobble version	print the version

Set PANOBBLE_DEBUG=1 for debug logs.

How it decides what to scrobble

• Only players in [players].allowed (ids normalized: chromium's .instanceNNN suffix is stripped). Hostnames in [players].blocked_hostnames never scrobble.
• A track qualifies after min(50% of its duration, 4 min), minimum 30s (also the delay when the duration is unknown); paused time doesn't count. The scrobble is committed when the play actually ends — track change, stop, player exit, replay, or daemon shutdown — so last.fm never shows a track as both scrobbled and now-playing. Qualified tracks are journaled on disk, so a crash before the commit loses nothing.
• Tracks are cleaned first: placeholder metadata dropped, (2004 Remaster) and (Explicit) suffixes stripped, YouTube video titles parsed into artist/track, then your [[rule]] regex edits — contrib/config.example.toml has examples, including block rules.
• By default a track only scrobbles when artist, title and album are all present (require_album, on by default) — the heuristic that skips YouTube videos while scrobbling YT Music. Turn it off if your players report untagged files or radio streams.
• Failed submissions queue in $XDG_DATA_HOME/panobble/pending.jsonl and retry on start, hourly, and after the next successful scrobble.

Rule data

The regex rule set lives in rules/*.json as plain, RE2-compatible JSON — deliberately language-neutral so it can be reused by ports (each file notes the pano-scrobbler source it was extracted from).

License

GPL-3.0, as it derives logic from pano-scrobbler. Test fixtures in testdata/ originate from web-scrobbler via pano-scrobbler.