Archive for April, 2009

Why are we using last.fm anyway?

Now that last.fm has become a paid inter­net radio ser­vice, I’d say that most of its appeal relies on the pos­si­bil­ity of keep­ing track of what your per­sonal music tastes are, and how they’re  chang­ing over time. This is not easy to achieve with any desktop-based music library soft­ware, since the data­base that keeps your pref­er­ences will be almost cer­tainly lost as some point (chang­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion, lap­top, ran­dom search when cross­ing the USA bor­der, man-I-forgot-to-do-backups).

It would be nice to be able to get that data­base of music pref­er­ences out of last.fm and back in your music library. It would be even nicer nowa­days, since devel­op­ers are putting a fair amount of effort in the cre­ation of “smart playlists”, which take into account your music tastes, and it takes a lot of time to build a good dataset for that. Since the evil mac peo­ple have this fea­ture, amarok seems to have it too, I decided to spend a night hack­ing out a first imple­men­ta­tion of import­ing last.fm stats into Rhythm­box (which is, after all, the default music player for almost every gnome based dis­tri­b­u­tion). The result is avail­able here, and it seems to work fine so far, even if it can/should still be improved a lot.

No Comments

Why are we using last.fm anyway?

Now that last.fm has become a paid inter­net radio ser­vice, I’d say that most of its appeal relies on the pos­si­bil­ity of keep­ing track of what your per­sonal music tastes are, and how they’re  chang­ing over time. This is not easy to achieve with any desktop-based music library soft­ware, since the data­base that keeps your pref­er­ences will be almost cer­tainly lost as some point (chang­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion, lap­top, ran­dom search when cross­ing the USA bor­der, man-I-forgot-to-do-backups).

It would be nice to be able to get that data­base of music pref­er­ences out of last.fm and back in your music library. It would be even nicer nowa­days, since devel­op­ers are putting a fair amount of effort in the cre­ation of “smart playlists”, which take into account your music tastes, and it takes a lot of time to build a good dataset for that. Since the evil mac peo­ple have this fea­ture, amarok seems to have it too, I decided to spend a night hack­ing out a first imple­men­ta­tion of import­ing last.fm stats into Rhythm­box (which is, after all, the default music player for almost every gnome based dis­tri­b­u­tion). The result is avail­able here, and it seems to work fine so far, even if it can/should still be improved a lot.

No Comments