Now that I’m expanding my vinyl collection, I’m spending more time playing music on my record player and less time playing music on my computer. The problem is I still want to track my listening habits on my last.fm account. How can I get the best of both worlds and scrobble my vinyl listens to last.fm?

The answer is ScRYMble, a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. Once installed it’ll add a last.fm scrobble box to rateyourmusic.com’s album detail page that gives you the ability to scrobble tracks as you listen to vinyl, exactly as if you were listening to the album on your computer.

Steps to install ScRYMble

1. Install Firefox
2. Install Greasemonkey
3. Restart Firefox
4. Install ScRYMble

ScRYMble on rateyourmusic.com

Once you have ScRYMble installed, goto rateyourmusic and search for the album you’re listening to. In my case, I’m listening to The Beatles – Abbey Road. On the right, under the tracklist, you’ll see the last.fm logo and a login form. This is where you’ll use ScRYMble.

The actual useage of ScRYMble is very easy. In the track list, click the checkbox next to the songs you’re listening to. Enter your last.fm username and password in the form below the track list and click one of the buttons to submit to last.fm.

The two buttons submit your tracks differently. Scrobble in real-time submits the track list exactly as if you were listening to the music on your computer, taking into consideration track length. So if a song is 2 minutes long, it’ll pause 2 minutes before submitting the track. Scrobble a previous play does a lump submit of all checked tracks at one time. This option is useful if you previously listened to a song or album and weren’t able to scrobble it at the time.

ScRYMble is an absolute brilliant Greasemonkey script, and a godsend to any music lover. Now you can listen to your vinyl records and continue to track your listening habits on last.fm. Truly an excellent mix of the analog and digital musical worlds.

Photo Credit: nephilonix