HowTo : Scrobble from your Creative device on Windows XP

I started to scrobble yesterday. There are some interesting feelings attached to it ;-)

Allright. For those who are as ignorant as I was two days ago, let Last.fm explain :

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

So I thought I would really enjoy scrobbling. The bad news is : my MP3 player is a Creative. And as far as I am concerned, there is a general rule about Creative devices : the hardware is usually quite alright, the firmware is somewhat average and the software environment (OS integration, standard media players integration) is poor at the best. And who needs yet another custom media player like the Creative Media Source, with its poor user interface and its only remarkable feature, being that it natively supports Creative devices ?

I don't. But then, I really wanted to be able to listen to FM radio on my MP3 player, so an iPod was not an option (or that is what I thought at the time). So here I am today, stuck with my unscrobbable Creative device. Only Winamp today is able to read my songs directly from the device thanks to a plugin. But thanks to Jurel, I was able to cook up a recipe that will allow the most willing of you to achive your dreams.

Ok, so here are the required piece of software :

1. You need a Winamp.
2. If your device is a playsforsure (my Zen Micro Photo is), you should be alright with the default plugins. If not, try the plugin attached to this post. The thing is : make sure to be able to access your portable device from Winamp.
3. Now you need iTunes.
4. Then install the Last.fm software with (at least) the bundled iTunes plugin.

That is all (!). Now you can start scrobbling :

1. Start the Last.fm software, and enable scrobbling.
2. Start Winamp, and create a playlist for the songs you want to listen to. Save this playlist as a file (*.m3u) somewhere on your hard drive.
3. Open the playlist file with iTunes (do NOT close Winamp !). There you can listen to your files : iTunes will read them through the Winamp plugin, and the scrobbler will detect the songs played by iTunes ! There are a few annoying things to note though. First of all, it seems that iTunes loses the natural order of the playlist, and some of the information on the tracks are lost (like the artist name) until you play them once. And the playlist files do not seem to handle Unicode characters very well (I happen to listen to some non-english music...).

And no, I do not speak spanish ;-)

VS2005 SP1 is suckin' up your drive

Remember this old song about Windows 95 ? Softwares on Windows have always been demanding on hard disks, and it seems that disk capacity will never be enough. As mine is quite fixed, I am doing my best to optimize disk usage.

First thing I do is to regularly clean my temporary folders. Here are sample command-lines for this :
DEL /f /s /q %SystemRoot%\Temp DEL /f /s /q %TEMP% DEL /f /s /q %TMP%

Second thing is to use the Cleanup Tool. Either use it manually (launch %SystemRoot%\system32\cleanmgr.exe and follow the instructions) or automate it.

But all this is not enough, and I recently checked my drive for wasted space. And I happened to find that my %SystemRoot%\Installer folder was taking up more than 2.6Gb ! I tried to google this folder to find more about it, but I found that documentation is rather scarce. I could only find that what lies in there is very application dependent, and more research showed me that in fact a single application was responsible for about a 2.2Gb bloat : Visual Studio 2005. Or, to be more precise, VS2005 Service Pack 1 alone was responsible for this. So for those interested, here are two links about this matter and possible fixes by Heath Stewart : about VS2005 SP1 and about the patch cache.

IMHO, there must be something wrong in design about this cache feature...