AudioScrobbler (last.fm) coming here soon

October the 18th 2010 at 9 o’clock pm

Abstract

I would like to add a widget to the frontpage sometime showing my last played music, but will instead post a whinge about some bugs.

last.fm is a service which (among other things) collects data about what music its users are listening to, using various programs to grab listening history from desktop players, internet radio services, and portable media players (commonly known by an Apple trademark). The in crowd of bloggers have funky doodahs on their websites proudly displaying which tracks they are currently listening to, and I simply have to join in. I spent a minute today looking into it, but it seems there are some problems with the system (‘When are there not?’). The last.fm service unfortunately only tags music by track title, “album”, and “artist”, neither very useful. It seems I will have to shoe-horn my OGG composer tags into the artist data. Unfortunately, Amarok (my media player) does not support this when submitting data to last.fm (bug 254580). I will have to get round to that some time then when I have a spare ten minutes (though the git clone is guiltily running in the background right now…).