Strawberry Music Player provides ListenBrainz with a lot more metadata than any other player or scrobbler I’ve found.

I had a track that ListenBrainz consistently attributed to the wrong album, but on a lark, I put the folder into Picard and had it tag the files. Since then, listens submitted by Strawberry have the correct album cover art, but those from Pano Scrobbler still have the wrong one.

Looking at Strawberry’s source code, it’s picking up release and artist MBIDs that it finds on your music files and including them as part of the submission.

This cleans up a ton of weirdness that one could see in ListenBrainz but not last.fm (which I scrobble in parallel), such as plays for live and greatest-hits albums being attributed to whatever studio album they came from — something that didn’t happen all the time, but frequently enough to be maddening.

last.fm has its own quirks, above all considering Unicode ‘smart quote marks’ and ASCII ‘dumb quote marks’ to be different things. Which they technically are, but last.fm’s automatic tag correction fixes many other minor things like periods and spacing, while never matching up different quote marks.