A command-line scrobbler for Dutch public radio stations NPO Radio 1, 2 and 3FM

Npoleon is a command-line utility that helps you scrobble tracks that are being, have been, or will be played on NPO Radio 1, 2 and 3FM to Last.fm, a social network centred around music that – like 3FM – inexplicably still exists despite more than a decade of declining market share.

This tool was written over the course of several train rides in the Netherlands, mainly as a fun way to learn more about Go and to find out if I still dislike the language. Sadly it turns out I do, so don’t expect (m)any updates unless something is completely broken. Although Npoleon has a few rough edges here and there, I’ve been dogfooding Npoleon for a while now so you probably shouldn’t run into any major issues.

It only takes three steps to set up Npoleon for scrobbling.

First, download and install the latest version of Npoleon by downloading the right binary for your platform. Ensure that the binary is somewhere in your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin and has the executable bit set (using chmod +x).

You will need to create an API account in order to access Last.fm’s Track API. It doesn’t really matter what you enter here, because you will be the tool’s only user.

Once you have created an API account, Last.fm will show you a key and a secret. Write these to ~/.npoleon/config as follows, making sure to replace the dummy values with your actual key and secret):

Finally, run this command and follow the instructions:

This gives your specific instance of Npoleon access to your Last.fm account and allows it to scrobble tracks on your behalf. You only need to do this once.

Npoleon can scrobble tracks for three NPO radio stations: nporadio1, nporadio2, and npo3fm (or radio1, radio2 and 3fm). The examples below assume that you want to scrobble tracks for 3fm.

To scrobble a single track that’s currently being played, execute:

To keep scrobbling tracks indefinitely (at least until you terminate the command), simply execute:

You can also scrobble all tracks that have been played since a particular moment:

Or ask Npoleon to scrobble tracks until a specific time:

--from and --until can be combined to scrobble tracks for specific periods: