If you've been reading the last couple of posts on this blog then you'll know we're busy building a dashboard. I think it's fair to say that everyone at Spatie is music addict. We have the unwritten rule that whoever who comes in first at the office is DJ for the day. One of the things we'd like to display on our dashboard is which music currently is playing.

Last.fm is a web service that can make statistics of which music you've been playing. It does this by requiring you to install a little app that monitors which music is playing via iTunes. They have an API but it's not the prettiest one. That's why I wrote a tiny wrapper around the one function call that I needed: User.getRecenttracks.

Our wrapper called last-fm-now-playing makes getting info of the track that a user is currently playing very easy:

[code class="php"]$nowPlaying = Spatie\NowPlaying\NowPlaying($apiKey); $trackInfo = $nowPlaying->getTrackInfo($lastFmUserName);```

$trackInfo will hold an array with keys artist, trackName and artwork. If a user isn't currently playing anything false will be returned.