I’ve started playing with Audioscrobbler which has caught my attention. It’s kinda like a Flickr for music. Kinda. Actually not at all like a Flickr for music, but sorta, maybe. What prompted me was seeing a link on Blogjam’s sidebar for “Blogjam Radio” which produces a popup from Last.FM, a side-service from Audioscrobbler which takes its interpretation of Fraser’s music tastes and turns it into a streaming radio station. That’s cool, I thought. I want one of those. So I installed the Audioscrobbler plugin and let iTunes roll, feeding the titles of songs I’d played up to their database.
At time of writing my user page is pretty scant but in a week or so it’ll have scraped enough information to have a decent profile for a decent radio station. It’ll be interesting also to see who Audioscrobbler matches me with and what music I can discover from them.
Of course I’m also thinking about the Gmail experiment. It’d be really cool if we could feed songs posted there into the system but I suspect syncing Gmail and Audioscrobbler would just be too much work and break a few too many rules (though I could be wrong – Jez?).
In the meanwhile though, is anyone else using this service? It does seem incredibly unobtrusive – just sits there in the background gathering data. Let me know, either by email or in the comments.
I’ve been using this on and off for about a couple of months. The biggest problem is that the service doesn’t always update your tracks – mine haven’t updated since 25/9/04, despite that fact that XMMS gets used at least once a day here (I have the plugin that’s supposed to update the site with what I’ve played).
Other than that it seems like a great idea, a good way of discovering bands you’d never think to listen to… it’s still no replacement for the real thing though.
From reading other posts/boards/blogs, and from my own experience, it seems that there is a flaw with Audioscrobbler in that you frequently have to re-install the player plugin to get your tracks to ping your profile again. Granted, it only takes 12 seconds to do, but this is an annoying glitch that we all hope Audioscrobbler identifies and fixes.