Tag Archive for 'radio'

Last.fm Video Scrobbling

Published on November 15, 2010 in Miscel. 0 Comments

Awesome ! I did not know it. I mean, very recently the client updated itself, but I had no idea about this new feature. It was accidental that I came to know this. I was playing a few video songs in Windows Media Player when I opened my last.fm page, and to my surprise the songs had been listed! Then I checked my client and it was indeed scrobbling the songs. I haven’t tested if this is a wmp only feature or if it works the same with winamp or itunes.

Whatever, but the feature of scrobbling video songs is cool. I like it. :)

On the sad part however, last.fm has declared that they’ll be discontinuing the loved tracks and my playlist radios from the 17th of November. I’ll miss the loved tracks radio a lot.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Shoutcast Scrobbling In Last.fm

Published on August 15, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments

I was love with the last.fm radio until they made it a subscription only feature. And since I refuse to pay for something that I can get for free, I decided to give up the last fm radio and look for alternatives. I found the shoutcast radio and also the aol radio inbuilt in winamp. They were good and did the job for me.

But what I missed was the scrobbling of tracks. I wanted a plugin which could enable scrobbling of streaming music into my lastfm account.  I found none. This was until I stumbled across Streamripper.

Streamripper is a plugin for winamp which intercepts incoming stream and downloads them to the hard disk. It has a few options using which you can configure the location where the files are to be saved, the maximum size of the said folder, whether t he downloaded tracks are to be added to the current winamp playlist and so on.

So now to scrobble the tracks, all that needs to be done is this – start streaming some radio station. Streamripper detects an incoming stream and offers to save it. Start the interception. Now two streams get created – one for your winamp and the other for the ripper. You could continue listening to the station. But what I generally do is to switch to a different station for time being. Once the ripper has downloaded a few tracks and appended them to the playlist, I switch to the playlist created by the ripper. And obviously the lastfm scrobbler scrobbles the tracks played.

Occasionally, you might have to empty the contents of the folder where your tracks were being downloaded.

Happy streaming and scrobbling.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Lastfm Makes Radio A Subscriber Only Feature

Published on April 25, 2009 in Miscel. 0 Comments

This is the message I received from the lastfm today morning

Lastfm Radio Message

Lastfm Radio Message

I am heartbroken. I never expected such a thing to happen. I was becoming fond of their radio service. But to pay $ 3 per month to just listen to songs I have in my hard disk is just not worth it. Looks like the end of the road for me and lastfm. Its a last goodbye.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Vagalume – Last.fm Radio On Ubuntu Intrepid

Published on March 2, 2009 in Miscel. 0 Comments
Last.fm

Last.fm

I love the last.fm radio. Recently I made a transition from the windows operating system to the ubuntu intrepid. I love amarok too, but sadly it wasn’t able to play the last.fm radio. Upon googling around, I found that apparently last.fm had decomissioned their old protocol on the 31st of January, 2009 and thus amarok 1.4 wasn’t able to stream music anymore. I was disheartened. I began searching for alternative appliations to play the radio.

Lastfm client was the obvious choice. I used it to play radio in the windows environment. However, I met with another problem. Installed, account entered, proxy set – but it wasn’t able to play too. I have no idea what the problem is. It skips through a lot of songs before giving a connection error. Again failed !

Next I came across this Vagalume last.fm client. It has support for gnome environment. It installed and was pretty easy to configure. It has all the features of the official last.fm client, namely play all the radio stations (neighbours, loved tracks and personal library included), ban/love a track, edit tags for a track and also scrobble. The last.fm page now shows

Listening now using Vagalume – Tuned to Megadeth Radio

Yeah, you can select a radio based on a global artist tag/genre tag and also select tracks from your own lobrary filtered by the tag. Additionally, Vagalume also changes pidgin status to reflect which song you are listening to at the moment – pretty much all that I was looking for.

Installing Vagalume is easy too. All you have to do is

sudo apt-get install vagalume

The application installs. You will find the aplication in your Applications->Sounds & Video. Configure the settings, namely your username, password and proxy if any and get tuned into your favourite station.

Happy listening. :)

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Radio – Last Fm

Published on September 24, 2008 in Miscel. 0 Comments

I have been a member on Last.fm for quite some time now. I loved it right from the start. I like all kinds of statistics and last fm provided me those that I needed the most – my music listening habits.

Within a few weeks of signing up, I was frantically searching for sites where I could discover my musical taste and search for similar artists. I came across a page which displays the tag cloud of a user. It was here that I learnt my favourite genre – broadly metal, specifically progressive metal. Wow !

I made full use of last fm recommendations and links. Scanned for artists that would suit my taste, search for them on dc++ (the peer-to-peer we use inside the campus to share files) and try them out. The first three artists that I liked were Blind Guardian, Hammerfall and Helloween. Considering the fact that I had spent 3 months listening to just 3 artists, picking up 3 artists in a span of just 3 months was exhilarating.

The search hasn’t yet stopped. On the one hand I have diversified into rock and alternative, but also gone deeper into metal listening to symphonic metal, melodic death metal and a lot. At the moment my 500 GB hard disk has about 100 GB songs !!!

But I hadn’t realised the full potential of last fm until yesterday. Feeling bored of the playlists I already had, I wished if I knew any good radio. And then it struck me – last fm has an inbuilt radio. Wonderful !

Last Fm Radio

Last Fm Radio

And looking around a bit, I realised that the radio couldn’t have been much simpler. All you need to do is to enter any artist or tag name in the software and it’ll play the corresponding radio.

Last Fm Radio

Last Fm Radio

Great, isn’t it ? This was just what I wanted. Now I can tune into songs depending on my mood. Since examinations are going on at the moment, my radio has been playing symphonic metal all the time.

Last Fm Radio

Last Fm Radio

Simple and nice that the radio built into the software is, it still lacks an important feature – multiple tags. The only shortcoming is that you can specify only a single artist or tag at a time. I would rather have my radio playing me multiple tags at the same time, like symphonic metal AND progressive metal. Hopefully such a feature gets incorporated into the future launch of the client.

Till then, enjoy the radio. And yeah, even the radio songs get scrobbled.

Popularity: 1% [?]