Being in charge of the database that stores everyone’s scrobbles is a great responsibility and one I don’t take lightly. One thing that I get asked now and again is, “I’ve accidentally deleted Artist X from my profile, can you restore it please?”. Sheesh, the work of a Scrobble Overlord is never done! :)
Well, the simple answer is, “yes I can” but up until now I’ve not had anything that allows it to be done with the click of a button or two. I decided enough was enough and the result is this Playground app.
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the self-service Artist & Track Restore Tool.
Okay, so just a very brief explanation of how it works (skip this if you don’t care). When you delete anything from your library we don’t actually delete it, we move it to a different table in your database. We need to do this so we can keep track of what you’ve deleted to make sure we don’t keep offering it to you as a recommendation.
All this Playground app does is allow you to review what’s in your deleted tracks table and if you choose to restore them it just puts them back into your main scrobble table.
One thing to be mindful of is that your playcount may not update immediately since it is cached. This will auto-correct within approximately 24 hours.
Please note that this tool cannot be used to restore a deleted or wiped profile as can be found in the account settings… where erase really means just that!
I think this is a useful tool and hopefully you will too, but please let us know why if you don’t!
Comments
JoeD/sHiZodEM
1 June, 07:50
Very nice done!
But what I really miss is to change my username. After about 5 years I have a collection of nearly 50.000 scrobbelt songs. But my username doesn’t fit me anymore.
Would be a great feature if you could make the username changeable.
Best regards
JoeD
Tecfan
1 June, 08:05
Yeah! Finally I can restore all the mis-tagged stuff I deleted some weeks before auto-correction appeared! :D
Tecfan
1 June, 08:12
I wish we could see the time the individual, deleted scrobbles were done.. I don’t want to restore anything I deleted because of forgetting to turn off the music while I was away etc…
nomadsoul
1 June, 08:32
Just when I thought Last.fm couldn’t get any better you start to bring out a tool which even lets me correct my own dumbness. Love you guys.
MusX
1 June, 10:30
great news, didn’t even know I already delete so many artists :P question: will be available in future possibility to restore artists and tracks from global reset in account settings? really would like to do that
Diego
1 June, 17:24
question: i restored some tracks but the total number of scrobbles remains unchanged (43,494). is that an issue?
thanks for this, it’s really useful!
Diego
1 June, 17:52
ooops, sorry, just read the last three paragraphs.
thanks again!
Dzmitry
1 June, 20:50
I tried to restored deleted tracks, but each one has been restored into 2 tracks. This is a bug, I guess.
evilrix
1 June, 21:16
Hi everyone, thanks for the great feedback. Below I’ve taken a few of your comments that looked like they were important and I’ve tried to address them for you.
I’m afraid that at this time we have no plans to allow account migration.
It is, in the blog post above I explain why this is and that it will auto-correct in about 24 hours. It’s basically a caching issue. The tool is by-passing the web cache.
I do plan to fix this minor issue but it is quite involved and since the issue is purely cosmetic and since we know this tool is likely to be useful to quite a few people we decided to not worry too much for now.
Ahhh hahhh – gotcha! :)
In the track listing how many plays were identified for each track? If the play count is 2 then your library will be augmented by two, and so on.
I did test this quite well before putting it on the playground… using my very own live library — eeek!
If you mean an account wipe the short answer is no. When you select that option your database is completely purged and is totally unrecoverable.
All the best.
evilrix – Scrobble Overlord
Dzmitry
1 June, 21:37
Quote
======== I tried to restored deleted tracks, but each one has been restored into 2 tracks.
In the track listing how many plays were identified for each track? If the play count is 2 then your library will be augmented by two, and so on.
=========
Look, I had 6000-7000 scrobbles of Queen which I deleted by mistake some time ago. Since that I have listened Queen about 2000 times. Then I tried to use your tool. It proposed to restore 10000+ of Queen scrobbles for my account. I submitted request for restoring and now that I have is about 16000 scrobbles of Queen.
About half of them is just a duplication. For instance, I have the following:
Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 7 Sep 2008, 09:38 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 7 Sep 2008, 09:38 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 3 Sep 2008, 22:59 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 3 Sep 2008, 22:59 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 25 Aug 2008, 06:04 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 25 Aug 2008, 06:04 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 24 Aug 2008, 23:30 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 24 Aug 2008, 23:30 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 23 Aug 2008, 11:25 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy 2:54 23 Aug 2008, 11:25Each real play is displayed as two playes occurred at the same time.
I’m not sure what do you mean under “track listing”, but hope the problem I faced is more clear now.
evilrix
2 June, 00:03
Dzmitry,
hope the problem I faced is more clear now.
The issue is not the tool par se. The issue is that there was a bug identified a while ago in the web front end code that occasionally duplicated tracks when they were moved from the main scrobble folder to the deleted folder. This has now been fixed.
Unfortunately the restore tool has no easy way to tell the dups from the originals without making some assumptions that may be incorrect.
Thank you for getting back to me with that additional bit of information. When I am looking to fix the cache issue I’ll see if I can add some extra checks in there to try and prevent dups from being restored.
I do hope; however, that on balance the ability to restore deleted artists and tracks offsets this minor inconvenience.
All the best.
-Rx.
Harald
2 June, 05:33
Hello Ricky!
Thank you very much for this great feature. I didn’t know, that deleting sth from the music library will block it for recommendation. (In the german help its not mentioned – see http://www.lastfm.de/help/faq?category=93#160). Because of that here comes another feature request for your new undelete-page: Additionally to undelete it would be nice to have the function to delete it forever – as it wasn’t ever in the music library. Is that hard to do?
Cheers!
evilrix
2 June, 16:31
Hi Harald,
Thanks for your feedback.
If we deleted forever it would start getting recommended again. The moment you listen to it the track would go right back into your library so in the end nothing would be achieved.
Does that make sense?
-Rx.
kakashi
2 June, 20:41
Hi Ricky,
I’ve previously deleted some plays from several artists I regularly listen to. This was due to forgetting to turn the music off and not wanting my plays to be inaccurate.
In regards to recommendations, will I still get them based on the previously deleted plays/artists? Or are recommendations no longer made although I still listen to them? If so does the tool have to be used in order to bring those recommendations back?
BTW it’s nice to see a tool like this – going the extra step.
Thanks!
sewa mobil
5 June, 16:35
nice article..thanks
evilrix
8 June, 12:43
It seems my undelete tool gets some nice coverage here in case you’re interested in reading the article :)
sewa elf
9 June, 00:04
Nice article. Thanks
fergusmcphail
9 June, 07:42
I would be interested in using this, but the page has been unavailable for a few days. Is this just a temporary technical hitch?
evilrix
9 June, 08:22
Hello fergusmcphail,
I’ve just checked and the service is definitely running just fine. You must be logged into your last.fm user account to access it.
If that’s not the issue can you sent me a screen shot of what exactly you see? You can send it to me as a Private Message via the last.fm main site.
Thanks.
evilrix
10 June, 06:42
Just a quick update on fergusmcphail’s issue. After he kindly sent me a screenshot I was able to figure out that the issue seems to be related to a very high number of deleted tracks. I am hoping to get this fixed next week some time (other priorities permitting).
fergusmcphail, thanks for taking the time to provide that feedback, I truly appreciate it.
Kevin
13 June, 14:16
Ricky, thank you very much for this! No doubt this is an awesome feature – I have to disagree however with your reply to Harald. When I remove a scrobble, track or artist from my library that’s really all it should do in my book. Suggestions can be dismissed, artists and tracks can be blocked, so if my removed scrobbles really do affect my recommendations or any other part of the website I want to be able to permanently purge these scrobbles (for good) as well.
I often remove scrobbles because I left a second scrobbler (the official Last.fm scrobbler really needs improvement!) on while listening to music or because of “duplicates” generated by iPod syncing.
JoeD: After sending a kind request to Last.fm earlier this year asking to at least change the case sensitivity of my username and reminding them of how frequently this feature gets requested I was told the following:
Bummer!
evilrix
15 June, 11:08
Quick update.
a) The issue with the tool failing for users that have a vast number of deleted artists has been, um, fixed. Unfortunately, fixing this properly will take quite a lot of effort, more than I have time for right now, so the simple fix has been to restrict it to the most prevalent 3500 artists (based on the number of plays) in your deleted table. I suspect that for 99.9% of users this will be more than adequate.
b) The issue where the playcount takes 24 hours to reset should also be resolved. When you restore tracks now the tool automatically removes your playcount from the cache, meaning next time you load your profile page it will be reset direct from the database.
Thanks for all your feedback and, especially, to fergusmcphail for your patience whilst I looked into the failure issue.
-Rx.
deleted jarecek
18 June, 07:35
nic but useless for me coz i know what i am deleting and why ..
everyone really interested in keeping own library absolutely proper knows that last.fm definitely needs to make library fully editable. e.g. to merge 800 plays of “black holes and revelations” with 700 plays of “black holes & revelations” (you could imagine tons of more or less similar situations including artist names or song titles)
.. and also last.fm itself containts till today a lot of problematic behaviours (one song from different albums is counting in “all albums overview” as one, sometime is last.fm srcobbling artits or song different to real mp3 tag, same name for various artists .. and many others)
all these problems were one of the reasons i deleted previous account with 150k+ plays .. because fixing whole library meant spending a months of rescrobbling ..
Pim
19 June, 09:50
Now let’s get a tool which allows us to merge albums – that would be awesome. I’ve got tons of mismatched scrobbles like
Pet Shop Boys – Yes [CD1]
Pet Shop Boys – Yes [CD2]
Pet Shop Boys – Yes
Which I would like to merge as “Pet Shop Boys – Yes”. Or just a simple auto-correct for the album titles ofcourse :)
DJ München
23 June, 20:34
I just want to say thank you very much for your great service! :-) Keep on working, I’m looking forward to the next new features!
davia
1 July, 03:32
Thanks for all your feedback and, especially, to fergusmcphail for your patience whilst I looked into the failure issue.
chicken24
1 July, 03:35
everyone really interested in keeping own library absolutely proper knows that last.fm definitely needs to make library fully editable. e.g. to merge 800 plays of “black holes and revelations” with 700 plays of “black holes & revelations” (you could imagine tons of more or less similar situations including artist names or song titles)
Pim
1 July, 20:20
100% agree with chicken24. If we could just have a tool with 3 select boxes.
Select box 1: album 1
Select box 2: album 2
Select box 3: merge as album 1 or 2
That would be awesome and I would lose a lot less sleep over it :D
Josh
3 July, 18:39
Please allow us to delete and BLOCK artists from ever scrobbling. Since the destop client has a bug which prevents the selective scrobbling only of certain directories from working, podcasts now always get scrobbled on Windows iTunes, messing up stats with things like BBC news podcasts and interview shows. If we could at least delete the artist and prevent them from showing up again, this wouldn’t be a problem… or update the client so it does what it says.
JR
6 July, 21:39
Very nice and useful tool. Thanks, Ricky! Just one minor suggestion (I didn’t check if this has been brought up in the forums). If you’re logged out, you currently get this message: “Not available. Whoops, this page is not available right now. Please try again later.” which is a bit misleading and it might make more sense to change that to something to the effect of “You’re not logged in. Click here to sign in to your account”. Thanks again.
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