ArsGeek

In my last article, I said that musikCube had support for Last.fm through a plugin. You might be wondering what is Last.fm, even if you jumped quickly to their frontpage.Last.fm is, to quote them:

A service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you.

You can use Last.fm to listen to music, find out about artists you may like, other people with similar music taste, gigs in your local area, charts and quilts for your personal site, as well as much more.

In fact, it could be described as a social music hive. You can talk to people in groups that likes the same music than you, get music recommendations from them or give some. There are user-generated content such as reviews of either artists albums or events. Everyone can participate to this. To begin with Last.fm, you will need an audio player which has support for it. Here is a page from their website that can help you find plugins or audio players compatible with their system. The implementation is available, so it can be quite easily to any player.

After registering, everyone has a profile page (here’s mine) viewable by anybody. It lists the last songs you listened to. There are some stats available on the page such as a comparison of the different artists play ratio, either overall or from the week. You can see the neighbours and friends of that person and even shout something in their shoutbox. An interesting feature is the personal radio of someone. It can be really fun to hear what kind of music other people listen to. Something else of interest might be the attending events list; it lists which event someone will attend to.

There’s even a player that lets you listen to music similar to what you seem to listen, but you can’t control what’s coming next, even on your own player. You can listen to some audio extracts from different artists on their artist or album pages. There are some free full-length tracks available sometimes, but I currently haven’t found something, in my opinion, worth for me. I think those tracks are the same for every users.

The system lacks some polish someplaces, especially with mistagged files. Currently, it entirely trusts the user with the tags of the song being “scrobbled”. There is an effort to bring a fingerprint function to the songs so the songs will be verified to be what they claim to be, and possibly you will be able to verify your own library for mistagged files.

At last, there is some novelty to use this service, as you can have a picture you can append to, let’s say, a forum signature and everyone knows what you last listened to.

Here’s what I listen to.
I’m sorry if this last image breaks the design a bit at the end of the post, hopefully this text will push the “social icon bar” far enough to not break the design much…

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