I decided to try the subversion version of amaroK because of it supposedly supporting syncing the iPod with last.fm, and have found a couple of issues with it.

1. A fault which appeared in 1.4-beta3 (beta2 was okay) is that if you manually set up the iPod device (I don\'t have pmount / HAL etc) and then quit amaroK, it doesn\'t load it back in from the config file when you restart, and won\'t let you add it again with the same name & mount point as it exists in the config file!

2. I don\'t believe the code for syning with last.fm can ever work properly as designed. As I understand it ...

- items listened to from amaroK are put into one submit queue, with the time of listening
- items listened to on the iPod go in a separate queue, with no time of listening
- upon a track reaching 50% or 240 seconds, or a single file\'s stats being synced from the iPod, the item is added into the relevant queue, and then up to 10 items are passed to last.fm

This all sounds good so far, but the method of picking an item from the queue is as follows ..

- if there are items on both queues and something has previously been submitted
- - if the first track in the iPod queue fits in the gap between the last submitted item finishing and first item in the amaroK queue starting (or now)
- - - add the iPod track to the list of 10 with a listen time of the last submitted item\'s finish time
- - end if
- end if
- if no item was picked from the iPod queue add the first item from the amaroK queue to the list of 10


If you sync the iPod with an empty submit queue nothing will get submitted.
If you then play a track there will be no last submit time so the first item in the list of 10 will be the active amaroK track, but then the iPod tracks will not be submittable in the same message as they won\'t fit in the gap between the currently playing track and now as there isn\'t one!

If you sync the iPod with items in the submit queue it will only manage to submit as many tracks as there is space between the last track played and now (which may be a few minutes, but there could be hours of play-time on the iPod)

If anyone is still reading at this point ... :unsure:

Is it possible to use the play time from the iPod when submitting to last.fm? If last.fm is clever enough to reject tracks which overlap, then if for some reason you listen to amaroK and the iPod at the same time, one will have to be discarded in favour of the other, but surely that\'s better than not syncing any of the iPod tracks at all. I suspect listening to the same track twice on the iPod may cause problems too, as only one time is stored.

It won\'t work at once and it won\'t work in any case, but in general, it works: if you quit amarok or if you don\'t play music for some time (but if you did), then the time of the last last.fm submission gets stored and will be used when considering if it\'s possible to submit items from the media device/time=0 queue. And these items get priority until the accumulated playtime reaches the oldest timed item.