Google’s Now Playing update breaks history sync with Last.fm

Google’s March Pixel Drop has just landed, and it is only packed to the brim with new features ready for us to try out. We’ve been spending a lot of time since then looking at our favorite additions, including the newly overhauled Now Playing experience with its own dedicated app. While we appreciate changes like the new album art, not everyone is quite so on-board with the refresh, as Google’s tweaks appear to break some previously relied-upon functionality.

Now Playing doesn’t just keep its virtual ear listening for the songs playing around you — it also keeps track of what it hears, for you to later refer to in your Now Playing history. While that works well enough, some users have apparently wanted to get that data into a more useful place, and it looks like a lot of them have taken advantage of solutions like Pano Scrobbler for automatically importing songs Now Playing detects into Last.fm.

This week, however, Last.fm users like birbeck1 over on Reddit’s Pixel sub point out that Google’s March update has broken the ability to sync up your Now Playing history, as a consequence of all these changes.

What went wrong? Well, this was never a formal process of exporting data, and as developer Kieron Quinn points out in his response to that post, existing solutions were extracting song info from Now Playing’s notifications. Those no longer appear like they used to with this week’s changes, and as result, tools that were previously able to grab Now Playing data from notifications no longer work.

It’s unclear if there’s any good recourse now, either. Google could put those back in, sure, but presumably it changed its approach here for a reason — and we doubt that breaking an unofficial tool would be sufficient cause for it to revert things.