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In this article I will discuss Last.fm, a scrobbling service, and present my “tools of the trade” for utilizing it for scrobbling and broadcasting what I’m playing.
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In this article I will discuss Last.fm, a scrobbling service, and present my “tools of the trade” for utilizing it for scrobbling and broadcasting what I’m playing.
Last.fm
Last.fm is a service that does something called scrobbling to the music you play. Scrobbling is just big fancy talk for storing the information about the music you play in a personalized database. From here you can keep track of your favorite artists, discover new artists with their radio service, broadcast what you’re playing, and tons more. If you want to experience even more their subscription service is surprisingly cheap.
Banshee
Open sourced Banshee has a ton of Last.fm plugins available. There are plugins for scrobbling music, shuffling your library by favorite or similar artist, listening to the radio, and broadcasting what you’re playing to your Empathy buddies. You can even use Last.fm’s fingerprints to scan tracks with unknown artists and find the correct meta data. Additionally, Banshee is capable of supporting Android, Ipod, and MTP devices.
Tweekly
Tweekly.fm lets you post your weekly top artists to Twitter and Facebook. It only posts once a week so it’s not too terribly annoying to your friends. Of course, there’s an option to post manually if you want to post more often than that.
Songbird for Android
Songbird for Android not only scrobbles the music you play to Last.fm, it also allows you to “like” songs on Facebook and browse through Flickr images of your favorite artists. As if that isn’t good enough, it’s open source too.
Last.fm Scrobbler
The Last.fm Scrobbler is the stand by go to tool if you’re in to “loving” tracks on Last.fm. It’s compatible with all the major Linux players. The only downside to this is you must start it with your player every time you want to “love” a track. If anyone knows of any players out there with the “love” function give me a shout out please.
Last.fm Google Chrome Extension
A more lightweight alternative and more practical if you use the internet a lot while you listen to music is the Last.fm Google Chrome extension. From here you can view your recently listened to tracks and “love” them.
Conclusion
Considering the amount of support out there for Last.fm, especially when it comes to Linux, this is no service to be sneezed at. The music recommendations are especially useful for finding new music and the benefits of having a database of all your favorite albums, songs, and artists are obvious – if you should ever lose your music, at least you have a list to start out with. When you share what you’re listening with the world, you’ll be surprised to find out how many people you know like the same music you do. Full Story |
