Rolling last.fm thread 2012: The Scrobbling

We’ll talk a bit more about radio playlisting in a separate post, but one of the main characteristics required from the other type of engine is the ability to choose from music collections of wildly varying sizes. Our existing engines have mostly been targeted at very large commercial catalogues containing millions of recordings – you can see them at work in the Last.fm Spotify app (start playing any track, go to the Now Playing tab in the app and click “Similar Tracks Playlist”).

The new generation of engines is designed to continue to do a really good job when choosing tracks from small personal collections. In practice that means we can’t rely on any single type of information to tell us which other tracks might be a good match for any particular playlist. Luckily thanks to your scrobbles and tags, and a bit of audio analysis and machine learning magic on our side, we have three independent types of information linking artists and tracks. Another new feature is the ability to generate playlists based on mood and other musical properties. Finally when playlisting from personal collections we’ve been able to experiment with ways of choosing the sequence of tracks that aren’t restricted by licensing rules.

But we know we still have a huge amount to learn before any machine can approach the skill of a human DJ, so we’ve built a simple demo to let you try out the services. Please let us know how you think we’re doing and we’ll incorporate your feedback into our final version of the new engines. Thanks for listening!

Mine:

http://www.last.fm/user/TheJupiter8

Your musical compatibility with TheJupiter8 is Low ;_;

Hehehehe! Gimme a chance, I only started this yesterday! :P

Your musical compatibility with TheJupiter8 is Medium

Music you have in common includes Japan, The Cure, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, The Stranglers and New Order The 80s.

HA! Yeah, I'm on a bit of an '80s kick at the moment... having said that, when am I not?

We're super! Except for Smashing Pumpkins, not super.

very low :(

Not enough Alicia Keys Alicia, eh? :)

Your musical compatibility with TheJupiter8 is VERY LOW
Music you have in common includes Simple Minds and Kraftwerk.

Pretty sure I've only ever scrobbled one Simple Minds track ('Twist/Run/Repulsion', which I genuinely think is great).

Your musical compatibility with TheJupiter8 is HIGH
Music you have in common includes XTC, Tubeway Army, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Human League and Ultravox.

Cool!

Your musical compatibility with TheJupiter8 is Very High

Music you have in common includes Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Depeche Mode, The Cure and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Love last.fm

Mine

Your musical compatibility with lipwreck is Super

Music you have in common includes A Place to Bury Strangers, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

12 months for Sombrehombre:

http://lastfm.dontdrinkandroot.net/tools/user/artistcloud/page?2-IResourceListener-content-cloudImage&antiCache=1354385910926

2 things:
* all of my neighbo(u)rs are male
* their 10 years of scrobbling stats are amusing -- I would not have guessed so many people had deleted Gaga.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/dec/13/lastfm-desktop-radio-service-paywall

^ Last.fm to start charging for radio plays, no mention on what this means for scrobbling and play stats

Personally I don't use the radio thing AT ALL, now we're in the Spotify era. Who would even pay for such a thing? What a terrible idea.

Anyone having trouble scrobbling from iPhone should get the CloudScrob app. I'd been having trouble for months until I got it.

I'm sure there are other apps out there for this, but my pal Martin developed a quick and dirty one to isolate "new" releases in your scrobbles.

http://rentayeti.com/top2012albums/

Is the new last.fm client fucked for anyone else? I'm on a Mac can't get beyond http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8184/8386413828_0e2aa0edfb.jpg after installation. I've been able to find 1.5.4 to downgrade to, but ipod/iphone scrobbling seems to have vanished.

Hey that's very cool... Almost mimics my EOY list, apart from the odd weird placement:

http://rentayeti.com/top2012albums/topalbums.php?username=charlieframe

Algerian_Goalie's Top 2012 Albums
Using Last.fm to figure out which new albums you listened to the most in 2012.
Error 95 - SimpleXMLElement error: String could not be parsed as XML:

^^^ Yeah I got the same

hmmm most of these arent 2012 albums
http://rentayeti.com/top2012albums/topalbums.php?username=Algerian_Goalie

I'll say it again for those who weren't paying attention - CLOUDSCROB for iPhone is brilliant if you're having trouble scrobbling.

I've got that now thanks - seems to do the job.

Martin's app probably isn't maintained all that well, fwiw. I think he just made it for friends to use.

its a cool app

The last.fm desktop app update is working perfectly fine for me... still getting used to it, though!

So last.fm is pretty useless now if you're running iTunes on a Mac, right? Doesn't autostart with iTunes anymore, but if I try to launch it manually it tells me to close iTunes. Seeing dozens of people reporting the same thing on forums. The lack of any acknowledgment from the last.fm people is the most disturbing part.

really? works fine on this mac.

Hmm, I don't know, I've been having problems for about 6 days now, since I updated.

to iTunes 11? I've got a lot of other problems with it lol but last.fm wasn't one of them.

Maybe try reinstalling the last.fm plug-in?

http://www.lastfm.com.br/user/shin70

So last.fm is pretty useless now if you're running iTunes on a Mac, right? Doesn't autostart with iTunes anymore, but if I try to launch it manually it tells me to close iTunes. Seeing dozens of people reporting the same thing on forums. The lack of any acknowledgment from the last.fm people is the most disturbing part.

― HAPPY BDAY TOOTS (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, January 21, 2013 3:55 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was just coming in here to complain about the same thing! it works fine if you open last.fm manually before itunes, but why do i now have to remember an extra step? why - once a-fucking-gain - does an updated version of a program that WORKED 100% FINE ALREADY just make it worse? why bother?

it also doesn't recognise ipod scrobbles -_-

It works fine for me- if anything it scrobbles from my iPod more quickly than the old client.

iPod scrobbling is a bit more reliable now for me too, but then I'm running it on Windows. Used to be cases where I'd listen to my iPod constantly for a week before plugging it in and it would scrobble about one album and forget all the rest and I've not been having that recently.

I still use CloudScrob. The Last.FM app on the iPhone can suck my balls.

Now that's what I call an upgrade.

apparently there's another update that fixes my issues. god, fuck updates though. NEVER INSTALL UPDATES why do i always forget this?

OTM^ I always do it though :-/

Last.fm scrobbler seems to work totally fine on anything that isn't an Apple product, I always had problems with it when I used an ipod. Luckily those days are now over.

I updated and then five days later noted that for no apparent reason (it was open, I was signed in) it hadn't been scrobbling anything. DDD:

Your musical compatibility with lexpretend is Very High

Music you have in common includes Dawn Richard, Kendrick Lamar, Miguel, Kate Bush and PJ Harvey.

awesome

you dudes should add my fuckin ass

http://www.last.fm/user/JAMOOL

http://www.soundamus.net/lfmnr/user/

mine
http://www.soundamus.net/lfmnr/user/algerian_goalie/html

it tells you of New and upcoming releases via your last.fm charts

so this is gradually getting shonkier and shonkier, huh

several times recently i've been unable to see my library, and this week apparently everything i've played has been multiplied by like 20, resulting in some pretty hilarious charts

it's basically Not Good Enough, i know last.fm has been overtaken by a ton of other sites/apps of late but still...