Some suggestions for the Smartphone client

After a little bit more of actually using the Smartphone client instead of just installing it, here's some suggestions for improvements. If they are possible to make and worth the effort I'll leave up to you :)

1. Automatically load the client when the Media Player is started (so as you don't forget to load it and only think you're scrobbling)

2. Unload the client from memory when the Media Player is unloaded, to save memory, there's not a whole lot of it in the first place anyways ;)

3. Don't clear the cache until a successful upload has been done, right now for example if I try to scrobble tracks while the phone is connected to the network/internet via a USB cable to my computer everything will work smoothly, but if I try to scrobble using 3G/GPRS the client will connect to audioscrobbler, it will make a successful handshake, then it will get a "general server error" (whatever that is) and nothing more will happen except that the cache is cleared and the tracks are not scrobbled.

4. I've also received en error I have no idea what's causing it, sometimes the tracks are scrobbled, but when I check the website I see a spam protection message stating the tracks were refused since they were scrobbled earlier than some other submitted tracks. Now I really don't see why this couldn't happen if I just had the standard client on multiple PC's playing at different times, so I'm not sure if this is some last.fm policy to only accept tracks in serial order or if it's some kind of bug in the mobile client ?

Apart from that, you said it yourself it's a little slow but I can live with that, I'm finally scrobblilng happily from my phone whenever going to or from work (several hours every day...), so lots of thanks for the client as it is of today :)

mithraist said:
After a little bit more of actually using the Smartphone client instead of just installing it, here's some suggestions for improvements. If they are possible to make and worth the effort I'll leave up to you :)

1. Automatically load the client when the Media Player is started (so as you don't forget to load it and only think you're scrobbling)

That would involve replacing the wmplayer.exe with a custom batch starter, which would then run WMP and the client. But I don't think that touching original OS files is a good idea. As a compromise, the client could check whether WMP is loaded yet when the client starts up, and start WMP if necessary. You could then remove or rename the WMP shortcut in the start menu and only use the last.fm Mobile icon to start both WMP/the client.

2. Unload the client from memory when the Media Player is unloaded, to save memory, there's not a whole lot of it in the first place anyways ;)

I'll check how resource intensive checking for WMP regularly turns out.

3. Don't clear the cache until a successful upload has been done, right now for example if I try to scrobble tracks while the phone is connected to the network/internet via a USB cable to my computer everything will work smoothly, but if I try to scrobble using 3G/GPRS the client will connect to audioscrobbler, it will make a successful handshake, then it will get a "general server error" (whatever that is) and nothing more will happen except that the cache is cleared and the tracks are not scrobbled.

This is the same bug der_karl reported earlier today, it applies to PPC as well as smartphones.

4. I've also received en error I have no idea what's causing it, sometimes the tracks are scrobbled, but when I check the website I see a spam protection message stating the tracks were refused since they were scrobbled earlier than some other submitted tracks. Now I really don't see why this couldn't happen if I just had the standard client on multiple PC's playing at different times, so I'm not sure if this is some last.fm policy to only accept tracks in serial order or if it's some kind of bug in the mobile client ?

It's last.fm policy. It also applies to the official client, which does not allow Listening History Importing anymore after you scrobbled one single track (and basically history importing is nothing more than trying to scrobble a large amount of tracks played some time ago)

5. Could you possibly make the client not cache/scrobble the track immediately, but instead wait a few seconds, or a customizable length of time similar to the standard windows client, before scrobbling the track ?

If the smartphone client actually behaves that way (I'll check on this issue tomorrow), it's a bug. Like the PPC version, it should not scrobble a track before at least half the playing time or 240sec. have passed.

Thanks for your feedback!

mithraist said:
...using 3G/GPRS the client will connect to audioscrobbler, it will make a successful handshake, then it will get a "general server error" (whatever that is) and nothing more will happen except that the cache is cleared and the tracks are not scrobbled...

+1, same problem here. Also occurs trying to connect via wifi (I'm on an HTC S620 - is that the Excaliber?).

I noticed that I had the same error message when I hadn't entered my password, but of course when I tried re-entering it, it cleared my cache (as noted by der_karl) but would allow me to start scrobbling again... Maybe they are related?