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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Stop Receiving the Message "Your soundcard is either busy or not present. Try restarting the application." - Last.FM Scrobbler


Your soundcard is either busy or not present. Try restarting the application.

Some Last.FM users are still being plagued by this issue, yet Last.FM only recently listed it as a "known issue" (March, 2010). Until then, the only sure-fire way to end the message and access the scrobbler was to uninstall/reinstall the software, but some users complained that even this didn't work for them. It was a short-term solution anyway, as the error eventually returned.

Only users accessing Last.FM via the downloaded scrobbler have ever seen this; no one has ever reported this issue when accessing the site through their browser (that I'm aware of). One user reported this issue under Mac Snow-Leopard, but (as noted below) he may well have been suffering a legitimate error; almost all of the users who experienced this problem were running Windows 7 - a handful were running Vista. The listing in Last.FM's "Known Issues" notes it as specific to Windows 7.

The following is for Windows 7:

  • Unpin it from the taskbar.
    Don't launch the scrobbler from the taskbar.
    (When you listen to Last.FM through the scrobbler - when the program is open and running - an icon will appear in the taskbar, just like it does with any program; this is normal. If you Stop playback but do not Exit the scrobbler, it will remain in your taskbar. The icon should not appear in the taskbar when the program is not open.)

It should be noted that "Your soundcard is either busy or not present. Try restarting the application." is an actual error message from the Last.FM scrobbler which can be returned for many reasons. If you receive this error, but the scrobbler is not pinned to your taskbar, you need to continue troubleshooting.

I did not include the name of the user who shared this solution (and, I assume, discovered it) out of respect for his privacy; I did not solve this issue and am neither discounting, nor trying to obscure, this member's contribution. I am very grateful to him, as are many other Last.FM members, and that should not go unsaid!

As of March 2010, Last.FM lists this as a "Known Issue." The Cyberculturalist posted a (very) brief and rudimentary starter's guide to the Last.FM Scrobbler back in January.

© C Harris Lynn, 2010

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

HEY!

I googled upon this during my plague of "Your soundcard is either busy or not present." in last.fm - I did what you instructed and last.fm tools - options started to recognise the soundcard and no bugs! :) Me happy now.

Cheers,
D.

Manodogs said...

Hey D,

Thanks for the comment and I'm glad I could be of help. It took me forever to figure out and there were like four or five message threads on the Last.FM forums. I think that's where I eventually found the solution, but not until after weeks and weeks of messing with it and hundreds of similar posts.

If you click "Last.FM" in the tags beneath the post, you'll find more stuff about Last.FM and the Scrobbler. Hope it helps!