Simple PHP Code To Get last.fm Last Played Tracks

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

$username = 'philipnorton42';
$scrobbler_url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/" . $username . "/recenttracks";
 
if ($scrobbler_xml = file_get_contents($scrobbler_url)) {
	$scrobbler_data = simplexml_load_string($scrobbler_xml);	
 
	echo '<ul>';
  foreach ($scrobbler_data->track as $track) {
    $string = '<li>';
    $string .= '<div class="cover"><img class="cover" height="28" src="' . $track->image[0] . '" width="28" /></div>';
    $string .= '<p><span class="title">' . $track->artist . '</span><br />' . $track->name . '</p>';
    $string .= '<p>Played: ' . $track->date . '</p>'; $string .= '</li>';
    echo $string;
  }
  echo '</ul>';
}

What this code does is to grab the XML feed containing the latest played songs from last.fm and convert them into a set of list elements containing some information about the tracks. This is done very simply by using the simple_xml_load_string() function, which works quite well for most situations and in this case only destroys a small amount of information that isn't really needed. Each track contains information about the artist and track that was played, including album artwork. Here is a breakdown of the information available in the feed, with the latest song in my own playlist as an example.

• artist : The name of the artist (e.g. "The Black Dahlia Murder").
• name : This is the name of the track (e.g. "Deathmask Divine").
• streamable : This is a boolean value (as a 1 or a 0) that states if the track can be streamed.
• mbid : The mbid is an ID of the song, but is lost when the XML feed is passed through the simplexml_load_string() function. This doesn't matter, however, as we probably won't need it when printing out the results.
• album : This is the name of the album that the track belongs to (e.g. "Nocturnal").
• url : This is a URL that links back to the track information on the last.fm site. For the example I gave above this is http://www.last.fm/music/The+Black+Dahlia+Murder/_/Deathmask+Divine.
• image : This is an array if different images for the album cover. Although the sizes are lost in the translation from XML the array translates to the following sizes:
  • 0 : Small image size, 34px by 34px.
  • 1 : Medium image size, 64px by 64px.
  • 2 : Large image size, 128px by 128px.
  • 3 : Extra large image size, 300px by 300px.
  You can see in the example above that I have selected the small image size in the array by using $track->image[0].
• date : This is the date and time that the track was played on (e.g. "21 Nov 2011, 15:28").

One addition to this code would be to stop it pulling in the entire feed on every page load, which isn't really needed. The addition of a small amount of caching code is ideal to keep page load times down (especially as we are relying on a third party service). We only need to store the data in a separate file for about 3 minutes or so (the average playtime of a song) so this time check is also added to the code.

<?php
 
$username = 'philipnorton42';
$scrobbler_url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/" . $username . "/recenttracks";
 
$scrobbler_cache_file = 'scrobbler_' . $username . '_data.cache';
 
if (file_exists($scrobbler_cache_file)) {
  if (time() - filemtime($scrobbler_cache_file) --> 180) {
    // if the file was created more than 3 minutes ago then delete.
    unlink($scrobbler_cache_file);
  } else {
    $scrobbler_url = realpath('./' . $scrobbler_cache_file);
  }
}
 
if ($scrobbler_xml = file_get_contents($scrobbler_url)) {
	$scrobbler_data = simplexml_load_string($scrobbler_xml);
 
  if (!file_exists($scrobbler_cache_file)) {
    file_put_contents($scrobbler_cache_file, $scrobbler_xml);
  }
 
	echo '<ul>';
  foreach ($scrobbler_data-&gt;track as $track) {
  $string = '<li>';
  $string .= '<div class="cover"><img class="cover" height="28" src="' . $track->image[0] . '" width="28" /></div>';
  $string .= '<p><span class="title">' . $track->artist . '</span><br />' . $track->name . '</p>'; 
  $string .= '<p>Played: ' . $track->date . '</p>';
  $string .= '</li>';
  echo $string;
  }
  echo '</ul>';
}

You can see the code (or at least a variant) in action on Julie Cheung's site. If you want my to write something like to for your own blog then let me know, as long as I can create a blog post out of it (and perhaps a backlink) I'm happy to help.