How To: Scrobble YouTube Videos to Last.fm

Last.fm, a service with social networking components, has proved very popular with music fans who like to share their tastes with their friends, and one of the best parts about it is that it lets you scrobble your music. Scrobbling is a process that involves getting the song info and uploading it to Last.fm, and you can do it from almost any source, like Last.fm's streams, a multitude of PC media players on Windows and Linux, and even portable music players. But did you know that you can also scrobble videos from YouTube so they would show up on your last.fm profile?

You can, and the process isn't very complicated. If you are using Mozilla's Firefox web browser you are set to go. First you have to install the popular Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox, which you can get from here, and which you can install just like any other add-on. What it does is it lets you modify the way web sites behave and look with user-made scripts.

There is a Greasemonkey extension for Internet Explorer here but we haven't tested it. If you do and it woks be sure to leave us a comment. After you install the add-on and restart your browser you will have to install a Greasemonkey script called youscrobble, which is available here.

Now you're all set. The next time you watch a video on YouTube a scrobble button will appear next to the upload one in the right corner. You will be asked to fill in your login credentials for last.fm and then you can scrobble the videos you are watching. The videos have to be at least 30 seconds long. Also, you will have to wait until at least half of the video has played even if you click the scrobble button before. Closing the window before that will cancel the submission.

The script will try to guess the name of the band and of the track from the tile of the video but, as we all know the types of names YouTube videos have, it doesn't always work. Titles like 'band – track title' will work but nothing else. That being said, it would be nice to have an automated system but for now this will have to do.