Last.fm
For those readers of this blog who have yet to discover Last.FM, you don’t know what you’re missing. First, you set-up an account on the last.fm website. Then you download the last.fm software for your computer – there are good versions available for the Mac, PC and Linux operating systems and, from my observations of the Linux and Mac versions, they work pretty much the same.
Two things then happen: first, whenever you play music using the music player of your choice (in my case, iTunes for the Mac and Amarok for Linux), details of what you are playing are sent to your account on Last.fm. A profile is then built up of your listening tastes. Eventually, last.fm is able to construct a “personal radio station” of music which is akin to the stuff you’re playing at home. With time, it can get very accurate – although if you’ve got very catholic taste, such as I do, you may find it can be a bit random in what it plays.
Better still, you can also use the last.fm player to play “tags” of certain kinds of music. In particular, I listen a lot to the ECM records tag. This plays a glorious selection of eclectic and innovative musicians, broadly coming out of contemporary jazz who have typically recorded on ECM records at some point. (People such as Jan Garbarek, Keith Jarrett, Eberhard Weber, and so on.) But you choose your own. When I get tired of listening to my own collection, and want to look for inspiration for new CDs to buy, this is where I get it. If you really like a piece it’s playing to you, you can click on the icon in the tray and it will bring up not only the piece and album details, but link you to Amazon or iTunes where you can order it there and then.
My last.fm software is also supplying the data for the ‘currently listening to…’ sidebar on this blog – so it’s a relatively up-to-date feed of what I’m really listening to: warts and all.
Posted on Tuesday, 25 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in geekism | 1 comment
Comments
So that is why your “Listening to…” is so eclectic. As you may have gathered, we’ve picked up on it as well. We will have to exchange account names so we can be friends! My “Listening to…” is always a week out of date because I use the Weekly album chart feed.
I haven’t really figured out the personal radio station bit yet but have used Neighbors and Reccomended and they are a pretty good match for our home collection.
