lastcast

Scrobble music playing on Chromecast devices to last.fm and libre.fm.

By default, lastcast will scrobble music playing on Spotify, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Plex, and YouTube Music but can be configured to scrobble any media player that supports Chromecast.

A Note for Spotify Users:

Last.fm now has first class support for Spotify, and you should probably use this rather than lastcast.

Requires Python 3.7+. If you need Python 2 please install lastcast==0.7.0

Getting started

pip3 install lastcast

Set up an initial configuration with the configuration creation tool:

lastcast --wizard

If you'd prefer to set up the configuration manually, modify example.lastcast.toml from the repo and save it to ~/.lastcast.toml.

Once the configuration file is in place, just run lastcast to connect to the Chromecast and start scrobbling!

Linux / systemd instructions

1. sudo pip3 install --upgrade lastcast
2. lastcast --wizard
3. Edit the code block below as needed (remember to fill in the config path!) and write to /usr/lib/systemd/system/lastcast.service (or /etc/systemd/system/lastcast.service if the directory doesn't exist)
4. sudo systemctl daemon-reload
5. sudo systemctl enable lastcast

[Unit]
Description=lastcast
Requires=networking.service
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/lastcast --config [PATH TO lastcast.toml]
Restart=always
RestartSec=5
# Set this to run as your user rather than root!
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Linux / systemd troubleshooting

If your lastcast installation is not scrobbling check its log calling journalctl -f _COMM=lastcast

If you see the following error

RuntimeError: Click will abort further execution because Python 3 was
configured to use ASCII as encoding for the environment.

This system supports the C.UTF-8 locale which is recommended.
You might be able to resolve your issue by exporting the
following environment variables:

export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
export LANG=C.UTF-8

modify the lastcast.service file you created in the previous section as by adding the following to the [Service] section

Environment="LC_ALL=C.UTF-8"
Environment="LANG=C.UTF-8"

Detailed macOS setup

(for anyone not familiar with Python and pip)

Enter the following commands in your Terminal (Terminal.app, iTerm2, etc.):

1. brew install python3
2. sudo pip3 install --upgrade lastcast
3. lastcast --wizard

This will prompt you to create a last.fm API application and then ask for your login information, which will only be stored locally on your computer.

You may get an error on step 2 about cc missing. If this is the case, install xcode by running xcode-select --install and retry step 2.

Now everything should be set up. When you want to start scrobbling, simply run lastcast in the terminal.

Docker setup

lastcast uses a Docker volume in order to link the configuration file into the container.

# Path to configuration file. Make sure to use an absolute path.
export CONFIG_PATH=/path/to/your/lastcast.toml

docker build -t lastcast .

docker run -it                   \
  --net=host                     \
  --name lastcast                \
  -v $CONFIG_PATH:/lastcast.toml \
  lastcast

# If you need to generate a config file, run the wizard:
docker run -it                   \
  --net=host                     \
  -v $CONFIG_PATH:/lastcast.toml \
  lastcast                       \
  lastcast --wizard

No Chromecast devices found?

It is possible that an incompatible version of netifaces will prevent lastcast from finding any Chromecast devices on your network. This is known to affect Windows 10 with netifaces==0.10.5 installed.

The fix, as described in this StackOverflow answer is simply to uninstall the wrong version and manually install netifaces==0.10.4.

$ pip uninstall netifaces
$ pip install netifaces==0.10.4

If you still can't discover any Chromecasts, please open an issue.