For those who don’t know, iScrobbler is a plugin for iTunes for sending information about your listening habits to Last.fm. It runs in the background and sends a notification to Last.fm every time you play a track. By doing this for long enough, the service builds a very good picture of your music preferences which it uses to link you with other people with similar tastes, to recommend new music to you that’s similar to what you like, and to inform you of upcoming events you might be interested in.
I use the Last.fm/iScrobbler service to supply the infobox on Soylent Red telling you what I recently listened to. But I like to listen to podcasts in iTunes and I’d prefer if these didn’t show up on Soylent Red (not because I have anything to hide—I don’t care if you guys know when I’m listening to Macbreak Weekly—but because that’s not what that part of the site is for). After a bit of poking around I discovered a set of hidden preferences for iScrobbler, including the ability to filter tracks by artist, genre or file path.
Read the whole linked page for the details, but if you only want to filter out podcasts, here’s how:
- Quit iScrobbler
- Open a terminal and type the command:
defaults write org.flexistentialist.iscrobbler "Track Filters" '("Podcast")' - Start iScrobbler
Simple as that! Now your podcasts will stop showing up on Last.fm.