The Last.fm Scrobble Fetcher & Mapper does exactly that. It fetches all your scrobbles from your (or anyone’s, really) Last.fm account, assembles them in terms of Play Count and Date Last Played for each music track, and then exports this data to either Windows Media Player 11 or iTunes.

I’ve been working on this application on and off for some time now and I think it’s ready for deployment. I built it because I have quite an extensive music library, I like my playlists smart and automatic, and I have poor luck with music players, hardware failure and vendor lock-in.

It seems that the “Play Count” and “Date Last Played” metadata fields are not part of a file’s ID3 tags, but rather is stored in the player’s local library. This is usually fine, and probably more efficient than writing to files all the time, but it means that if your player’s database gets corrupted (as happened to me with Windows Media Player) or that you decide/are forced to use another player such as iTunes because your iPhone doesn’t want to sync with anything else, then you’re screwed. And same thing of course if you reinstall your machine or get a new one.

I feel that this metadata is important because I like to have automatic “best-of” playlists that are based upon it, and sometimes it’s nice to listen to a comfortable, time-proven playlist.

Thankfully, if like me you’ve been using the Last.fm services since they were called Audioscrobbler, you’ve gathered an impressive amount of playback information in your account over the years. And using their web services, and my application, now you can take it back home!