lastfm-export.sh

A very basic script to download all "scrobbled" tracks for a user from https://last.fm

There are already a lot of scripts and tools to do the same, but these are either web based tools (which I feel a bit uncomfortable to interact with) or they are much more complicated, require lats of dependencies or simply didn't work out of the box.

I wanted to create a oneliner in simple shell script because the required API call is really very simple.

Ultimately it became a bit more complicated because there is no option to order the results so we can't use pagination to fetch the most recent results. The solution is still pretty simple: save files with the most recent scrobble timestamp as file name, use most recent timestamp + 1 second to resume from and that's it.

Requirements

• zsh - this is the default on Mac OS (maybe bash will work, too lazy to test)
• curl - for making the API requests (default available on Mac OS)
• jq - for processing the downloaded JSON data (brew install jq)

Setup

1. get a Last.FM API key https://www.last.fm/api/account/create
2. edit example.env to set your API key and last.fm user name
3. save as .env and run the script

When running the script at a later date, the timestamp of the last scrobbled track is used to resume from.