Scrobbling behavior

A Now Playing update and a scrobble are separate Last.fm operations. WebRadioFM can send the former when playback begins and the latter after enough of an eligible track has played.

Now Playing

A track change triggers SendNowPlaying() when all three conditions are true:

• a Last.fm session is authenticated;
• Submit Now Playing is enabled; and
• Scrobble enabled is enabled.

The request sends transformed artist, track, album, and total duration to track.updateNowPlaying. A success callback writes Now Playing on Last.fm to the status line. A failure clears that line.

Disabling scrobbling also disables Now Playing even when the dedicated Now Playing checkbox is on.

Scrobble eligibility

The one-second progress tick exits without a submission when any of these is true:

• no authenticated session exists;
• no active track exists;
• scrobbling is disabled;
• a request for the current attempt is already pending;
• that Track object has already been marked scrobbled;
• duration is zero; or
• duration is less than Minimum track duration.

Metadata edits and blocking are evaluated only after these checks.

Exact timing formula

The configured delay is calculated as:

configuredDelay = Math.Min(
    ScrobbleDelaySecs,
    durationSeconds * ScrobbleDelayPercent / 100
);

The track becomes ready if either:

progress >= 50%
OR
positionSeconds >= configuredDelay

Therefore, the effective earliest threshold is:

min(50% of duration, configured seconds, configured percentage of duration)

Examples

Duration	Seconds	Percentage	Effective trigger
240 s	180 s	50%	120 s (50%)
600 s	180 s	50%	180 s
300 s	180 s	30%	90 s
300 s	300 s	80%	150 s (hard-coded 50%)

Percentage values above 50

The settings slider allows up to 95%, but the explicit progressPercent >= 0.5 condition means the app never waits beyond half the track solely because a higher percentage was selected.

Setting ranges

SettingsManager clamps values even if callers bypass the sliders:

Setting	Default	Allowed
Delay seconds	180	30–360 seconds
Delay percentage	50	30–95%
Minimum duration	30	10–60 seconds

Metadata transformation

Before Now Playing or scrobble submission, WebRadioFM transforms title, artist, and album independently:

1. apply literal find/replace rules in saved order;
2. apply regex replacement rules in saved order; then
3. use the transformed artist and title for blocking.

The local media file and playlist are not edited. See Metadata rules.

Blocking

Each non-empty line in Blocked Metadata is treated as a case-insensitive substring. The app builds:

artist - title

and blocks the scrobble when that combined transformed text contains any saved line. A blocked track is marked complete for the current play and the status becomes Blocked; it is not retried.

Submission data

track.scrobble includes:

• transformed artist;
• transformed track title;
• transformed album when non-empty;
• duration in whole seconds;
• Unix timestamp derived from the wall-clock time at the track-change event;
• API key and session key; and
• MD5 API signature.

Pauses do not change _playStartTime, so the timestamp remains the original track-change time.

Success and retry behavior

Before making the HTTP request, the page sets _scrobblePending = true and marks _currentScrobbledTrack.

• Success: status becomes Scrobbled!; the track remains marked and cannot submit again during that play.
• Failure: status becomes Scrobble failed and _scrobblePending resets to false. The same play is not retried: CheckScrobble() assigned _currentScrobbledTrack before calling ScrobbleAsync(), so the equality guard blocks the next eligible timer tick.

Current retry caveat

Although the error handler clears _scrobblePending, it does not clear _currentScrobbledTrack. The earlier equality check prevents an actual retry for that Track object. A new track-change event resets the marker.

Status labels

Label	Meaning
Last.fm scrobbling on	Authenticated; scrobbling and Now Playing enabled
Scrobbling on (no NP)	Authenticated; scrobbling enabled; Now Playing disabled
Last.fm scrobbling off	Authenticated; scrobbling disabled
Now Playing on Last.fm	Last Now Playing request succeeded
Scrobbled!	Last scrobble callback succeeded
Blocked	A configured block substring matched
Scrobble failed	Request/API error occurred