Internet & Music & Personal & Software Wojtek on 04 Jul 2007 06:12 pm
Fresh last.fm user
Yesterday, I’ve decided to join the last.fm band wagon. I’m still wondering why it took me so long to do this. I mean, it’s been out there for like a year or so (maybe more, I really don’t know) and I’ve always thought of last.fm users as the same bunch from the myspace craze. I guess I was wrong thinking like that, eh? I’m glad that I’ve decided to give it a try…
Now first and foremost, last.fm is a great tool to let people get to know what music you like listening to. It also enables you to easily find people who have similar musical tastes. It also gathers statistics according to your music and presents you with your own weekly, monthly or yearly music charts. I guess it’s also much more than that, but I’ll let you find it out for yourselves.
Anyway, how does it work? Either you download their own music player or use special software plugins for your favorite music players, like winamp, xmms, audacious (my player of choice on Linux) and many others. Some players have such plugins already built-in and so you’re ready to use them right out of the box. The software sends data about the tracks that you play back to last.fm, which in return uses it to populate your music profile. Easy as pie and you only need to spend a couple of seconds to set it up (in most cases you only need to enter your user name and password in the software).
These are the basics and I recommend that you give last.fm a try. It’s really a fun way to share information about your personal music tastes. I hope you’ll like it as much as I do.
You don’t need to register in order to see people’s profiles so if you wish to check-out my music profile, simply click here.
on 06 Jul 2007 at 4:45 pm 1.Max Kelley said …
Nice choice of audacious :) If you haven’t tried Pandora yet, it’s equally as cool as last.fm, and it’s pretty good audio quality.
on 06 Jul 2007 at 6:37 pm 2.Wojtek said …
In my opinion, xmms lacks in some basic features and I have had some problems with it (like skipping on properly encoded MPC files) and that’s why my player of choice under Linux is audacious.
Yes I know Pandora, I use it from time to time, it’s quite good and ingenious, but unfortunately it lacks the “info sharing” features of last.fm. You know, the whole “web 2.0″ approach.