How I discovered Last.fm

For a few years already JuK has been my music player of choice. I knew AmaroK was a much more powerful music player for KDE, my preferred desktop environment, but since JuK did everything I needed, I sticked with it (Don't fix what isn't broken, remember). Lately I wanted to listen to some podcasts, and being tired of copying the URL's from the XML and pasting them in xmms or gxine, I tried AmaroK. It actually has a really clean interface, compared to the number of features it has. And shortly after discovering AmaroK I discovered Last.fm.

Last.fm calls itself 'The social music revolution'. First you register, and then enter your username/password in the Last.fm plugin of your music player. AmaroK supports this out of the box. Every time you play a song last.fm will be notified and your profile will be updated. Based on this it can recommend music you probably like, or you can locate 'neighbours', people with similar musical interests. It allows tagging of songs or artists (tagging is hip, right). It's possible to create groups of people with similar interests, for instance the AmaroK user group, and get several aggregated stats showing the musical preferences of the whole group. It seems AmaroK users like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Beatles and Pink Floyd.

The site has a really neat design, everything is clear or is clearly explained. There's a bit of javascript to improve the browsing experience, but not so much that it gets odd. One of the things I really like and that I haven't seen yet on many sites is that they associated a stylesheet with their RSS feeds. That way, users unfamiliar with RSS at least get a page with a bit of information and the contained information in a readable format, instead of getting the XML tree. I'm aware this doesn't work in every browser, but at least it works in Firefox. Two thumbs up for this 'feature'!

One of the cooler features are the 'radio stations', just enter a number of tags and you get an audio stream with similar music. I haven't really checked this out but it looks promising. It's also possible to get a personal stream based on your profile, but that requires a monthly fee of 3€. Since 'De Standaard' charges 1,5€ for one day of access I find this reasonably priced.

Personally I'm also very interested in the web-services they offer, that way it's possible to show your favorite/most recent tracks on your blog, for instance. I was trying a wordpress plugin earlier on, but somehow the PHP installation on this server didn't allow writing to disk, so I couldn't cache. I disabled the caching, and it worked, and then it didn't. It says on their site that if you make more than one request per second your IP will be banned. Possibly I just had a visitor while I was testing and they kicked me off. I'll try again later. There are also AJAX based plugins, that way the user visiting makes the call.

Update : It's working now!

I added a link to my profile on the top navigation bar. Since 'plexus' was already taken I settled for 'sunnyplexus'. Big up for Last.fm!