Results tagged “last.fm”

My iPod goes with me everywhere and I listen to it constantly. Whether it's in the car for the daily commute or at my desk while I'm coding, the vast majority of my music is delivered that way. Those days that I accidentally leave it at home are the bad days, the bleak days of despair, the days that I have to (shudder), listen to the radio.

I'm also a bit partial to statistics about my music listening habits and one of the reasons I love last.fm. Ever since I joined back in 2006 I've scrobbled just about everything I've listened to from both the home "stereo" (these days a MacBook Pro, Bose speakers) and my iPod. But by far, the iPod accounts for the majority.

Last week, like an idiot a true early adopter, I upgraded iTunes to 9.2.1. And that promptly broke the ability to scrobble iPod plays. Bollocks. But, credit where credit is due, last.fm released an update to the client app which fixed the issue nicely. Which is really rather impressive response time.

So now I'm all happy and can breathe again because as any last.fm addict will tell you...

Because it's important to keep you informed. Hey, I do what I can.

A while ago I wrote count-by-artist to go through my iTunes Library XML file and count up all the tracks by artist. I hadn't ran it for about 18 months so this morning while sipping my coffee I decided to fire it up to see if anything had changed.

Aha, and while Depeche Mode, The Cure, and Skinny Puppy have the most songs in my music collection, they're also who I've listened to most over the past four years. Coincidence?

Who do you find you end up listening to most?

I'm a self confessed music addict. I have been for as long as I can remember. I listen to music all the time: getting ready for work, in the car, writing code at work, in the car again. Well, you get the idea. Today it seems, I scrobbled my 150,000th play to last.fm.

I became aware of last.fm back in 2006 and since then have found it to be one of the best places to find out about new music. If you're into music and you've never tried last.fm I thoroughly recommend it.

How does it work?

After creating a last.fm account, you install software on your computer that submits every track you listen to back to the last.fm servers. They call that scrobbling. After you've been scrobbling for a while last.fm will learn what you like and offer recommendations of new artists. Which is all rather handy.

What's more, over time, other like minded last.fm users will come along, say hello, and leave their two-penneth on what they think you'd like to listen to. Plus you can always go looking at other user's charts to see what they've been playing recently. To be honest I love that the most as I've always been one for rummaging through other people's album collections when I'm at their house.

If manually poking through user's charts is not your thing, you can have last.fm stream their tracks to you. Streamable tracks and the ability to create playlists makes last.fm an invaluable service to me. I've been a subscriber for years because of this.

So, go give it a try if you're into this kind of thing. And if you do, stop by my profile and say hello. At the very least, you'll get to see the shitty drivel wonderful taste in music I have.

[Moozik: Chris & Cosey - Walking Through Heaven]

At the weekend I performed my first OS upgrade since becoming assimilated by Apple last year. For $29 it seemed like a no-brainer even though there were no new features. It would make stuff faster we were told. I like faster, so I dove right in.

The upgrade itself was quick and absolutely painless. Like all good OS upgrades should be. Except for when they're not. And I'm looking at you Ubuntu. Still, it was that little suckfest that finally convinced me to become a Mac addict so that things just work going forward.

The verdict after using it for a few days?

The good? Well it definitely seems faster. The Finder is certainly a lot snappier - thumbnail generation is lightning fast now for example. I do like new dock menu colors and the scrolling stacks as well.

The meh? I haven't noticed any speedup on system wake up when opening the lid on my MacBook Pro though. I could have sworn that was one of the promised speed improvements.

The bad? iScrobbler broke which I didn't notice until this morning. Which is a shame because the official Mac last.fm client is a little temperamental when it comes to scrobbling songs from your iPod. Still, a downgrade to iScrobbler 1.5.2 seems to have done the trick.

So overall, I'm a happy Snow Leopard user and can count my first Mac OS X upgrade a success.

[Moozik:Black Light Burns - I Am Where It Takes Me]

If you're anything like me, before you give someone your iPod, you kind of panic for a second. I mean, what if they see that embarrassing Right Said Fred song? Everyone, and I mean everyone no matter how cool they think their music collection is, has some songs that they'd rather not admit in public that they've listened to.

Of course, with the advent of last.fm, your listening habits can be somewhat more public than they used to be and even if you've now cleaned all evidence of those embarrassing songs from your media player, last.fm still knows all. This morning I was looking at my overall charts and noticed that I've certainly played some, er, interesting songs over the past couple of years. I mean, how did songs by these artists get onto my iPod?

Bee Gees
Bon Jovi
Cher
Kylie Minogue
Mariah Carey
REO Speedwagon
Rod Stewart
Wham

How about you? What skeletons do you have in your iPod closet?