New “Now Listening” Plugins
I don’t know where bloggers get this idea that people give a fuck about what music they listen to, especially at that exact moment, but I’m no exception. Up until now I had a sloppy plugin that read information from Winamp and posted it to my database, but the updating process would freeze Winamp for a couple seconds (very annoying), and wouldn’t update if I chose a complete album from my media library (mildly annoying).
I decided to get a Last.fm account and a pair of plugins that display the last track I’ve listened to, as well as the album cover. Now it’s easier to judge me by my taste in music, rather than having to read all the stupid shit I write.
Edit: Oops, they didn’t want to play well together. Album art didn’t always update consistently with the track title. Oh, well.
January 28th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I’m a huge fan of Last.fm. If you get like me and become too obsessed with the stats and having “clean” ID3 tags you should check out MusicBrainz.org, most of Last.fm’s tags are based off of it. (CSS is listed as being Cansei de Ser Sexy, for example, but Last.fm has it as both. I’d wish they’d get an artist and track merger feature going.)
Might want to check out What I’m Listening To, too, the best Last.fm Facebook plugin, in my opinion. I’d send you an application invite, but the last thing any of use need is more of those.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
I used Musicbrainz once a couple years ago and all it did was fuck up a bunch of beautifully tagged songs. I am obsessive over my tags and don’t trust mass tagging tools; I manually tag every MP3 I own with Mp3Tag and a set of custom scripts I carefully perfected to suit my tag requirements.
Aside from using Last.fm for my blog, I’m not totally sure what purpose it serves.
January 29th, 2008 at 6:00 am
It tells you what you listened to?
I signed up to use Last.fm a while ago, and the only thing it did was show me stats about what I had listened to most of, and who else on innernets also listened to that.
It’s fucking pointless when your music collection is as high in quality as gothic industrial as mine. No one else has the taste.
January 29th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I don’t use the MusicBrainz auto-tagger, either, just as a reference to manually tag everything. As for what Last.fm does, I do like having the stats and it’s pointed out a few good bands for me to check out. A lot of people have said it isn’t as good as Pandora was for that, but by the time I wanted to sign up for Pandora, it had already closed in Canada.
January 29th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Check one for AMERICA
January 29th, 2008 at 10:39 am
MERICA