Archive for April, 2009
Why are we using last.fm anyway?
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Projects on April 29, 2009
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.
Why are we using last.fm anyway?
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Projects on April 29, 2009
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.