Battleangel | Personal

Another late discovery. Someone recommended Pandora, the Music Genome Project, and after browsing wikipedia I realized that it was much like another technology that I had skipped, namely Audioscrobbler / Last.fm.

Yeah, I know, I’m probably the last person on the planet to get an account with Last.fm. I have always tried to program or scavenge what I need to run stuff like that locally … as best I can. Services like Audioscrobbler are usually crude and plagued by ads and pulling the data from an external source to display it on local pages is going to feel slow and congested. But Audioscrobbler really impressed in terms of flexibility (countless feeds, in countless formats) and smashed more than a few of the preconceptions that I had about the whole concept.
Not to mention the social possibilities, which I admittedly aren’t so keen on, even though they could be worth a great deal when finding rare music and recommendations. And just because I wont use them doesn’t mean that they wont entertain others.

Really makes you wonder why you bothered with that whole coding endeavor using AMIP when there was a much better service out there all along. One that didn’t just store song data but also drew up some interesting relationships and statistics. Not to say that I didn’t think about expanding the local script, but the database usage was just too intimidating.

I’ll run Last.fm for a couple of weeks to populate my profile and see how it goes. At least I wont have to fill up my own database with excess song information. I’m sure I can pull the data from the feeds and cache the results for site inclusion. If the Last.fm storage would ever crash, it wouldn’t really matter since I already purge my playlist every other month or so. Plus the Audiscrobbler plugin for Winamp actually caches song data locally in case of connection failure, so you can be relatively sure that the information gets uploaded. I can’t see any drawbacks so far. The amazing thing is how bad I am at thinking outside the box once I’m in the box and the box is of my own making.