OK, I've finally come up with a workable solution, for last.fm, and using XMMS/winamp, and my ipod.

Setting the time back on my ipod didn't work, because the clock is fixed when I attach it to a machine. Therefor yamipod, without being fixed, is no good.

I found another thing, called "audiopod goes iscrobbler". It reads the play counts file off the ipod, and will drop the entries into the winamp cache.

This will work fine at work, when I get in, I can connect my ipod, run the program, then start winamp, and my tracks will be timezone adjusted, and submitted.

I can then listen to music at work with winamp, and the data will be submitted.

When I get home, there would have been an issue. If I'd used XMMS, then I wouldn't be able to submit the music from the trip home, from my ipod.

I went about setting up a similar arrangement to work, using winamp and the plugin, so I could use "audiopod goes iscrobbler" at home.

First I was thinking that I needed to be able to connect the ipod to the windows VM. I shutdown the instance running, added a USB controller to it, and restarted it.

I then attached the ipod to the machine running vmware, and attached the ipod to the USB port in the VM. It was complaining that the ipod had already been attached to, by "usb-storage".

I unloaded the kernel module, and the I was able to attach it to the VM. Windows, running in the VM, detected it, complained that a high speed device was attached to a low speed port, and did nothing more.

It didn't mount it, and it didn't give me any access to it. I googled around a bit, and found that it's something to do with VMware not supporting USB2.0 properly, and also something to do with the linux kernel, which requires a patch.

Ugh. I then realised that I didn't actually need the ipod connected directly to the VM, since it just ends up with a drive letter, and accesses it through that.

I attached the ipod to my laptop as usual, created a symlink in my SMB shared home directory, to the mount point for the ipod, and then mapped a drive in the VM, to the shared ipod mount directory.

I was then able to run "audiopod goes iscrobbler" from the ipod, which read the DB, and then put the data into the cache file for winamp, in the VM.

I started up winamp, and it submitted the data. I was seeing lots of references to "BADAUTH" in the log file, but it had submitted the tracks anyway.

I just used it again, and it seemed to work, but I'm not sure if it failed to submit some tracks. I submitted the ones that I thought were missing again, and then it told me that they weren't accepted, because they weren't played latest, but the missing ones were listed at that point.

Maybe there's just a delay between some submissions, and them showing up in the recently played list.

Now it would just be nice if the "spam protection" on last.fm was a bit smarter, and would allow me to submit data out of order, and not force me to submit the tracks from my ipod before I play a song with XMMS or winamp.