Different tabs in the Now Playing app. | Image by Google
Google recently made the March feature drop available to all eligible Pixel devices. The update comes with many exciting upgrades, including the new Now Playing app, which was previously available only as a built-in service. However, since this change, some third-party scrobblers have stopped working entirely.
An important feature is now broken
The Now Playing app on your Pixel smartphone has a simple task: to tell you which song is playing around you. The app also has a dedicated History section that contains a list of previously recognized songs. While this section itself is quite organized, some users use tools like Pano Scrobbler to import the songs from Now Playing history into more useful platforms like Last.fm.
Tools like Pano Scrobbler and MacroDroid usually rely on a workaround to sync recognized songs to platforms like Last.fm. Basically, these tools monitor the Now Playing system notification to curate a list of identified songs. However, the March feature drop turned Now Playing into a dedicated app and reportedly suppressed this notification functionality entirely.
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As a result, third-party scrobblers now have no way to extract the data containing the identified songs. Reddit user birbeck1 believes the change was made deliberately. However, developer Kieron Quinn believes otherwise.
Quinn discovered an unused flag — NowPlaying__enable_notification_and_settings_redirect — in the Now Playing app's codebase. Because of this flag's existence, he believes the tech giant could restore notification functionality in the future, which would ultimately make tools like Pano Scrobbler useful again.
Which March Feature Drop upgrade do you like the most?
The only thing you can do now is… wait
Now Playing app on a Pixel phone. | Image by Google
As mentioned earlier, the flag that manages the notifications that scrobblers use to sync recognized songs to platforms like Last.fm is present but, for some reason, disabled. So this could possibly mean that Google could enable it at some point in the future, allowing everything to function as before. Until then, you have no option other than to wait.
Interestingly, a Redditor mentioned that Simplescrobbler can still export songs to Last.fm even after the March feature drop. However, I want to make it clear that I haven't used Simplescrobbler myself, nor have I heard of it before. So, I wouldn't recommend using it. But if you still want to, you can definitely give it a try.
All that said, the availability of workarounds like this, which allow exporting identified songs to a different platform, is why people prefer Android over iOS. Since Now Playing is a major feature of Pixel smartphones, and a good number of users use it with third-party scrobblers, I'm pretty confident that Google will fix what's broken in the very near future.
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Aman Kumar is a tech news writer with a long-standing passion for smartphones. Aman specializes in everything smartphones, from AI features like Pixel’s Camera Coach to understanding ideal hardware combinations. He loves breaking down complex features in a simple, clear way and hopes manufacturers bring back bold designs like the Nokia N-Gage. When he’s not writing, he’s either gaming on PUBG or talking fitness as a dedicated gym enthusiast.
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