Fairly Realistic

What is Last.FM?

Last.FM is an awesome streaming radio service based out of the UK. Two sentence summary: Last.FM tracks which music you listen to by creating your own personal profile on their website via a plug-in for your streaming software. (iTunes, Winamp, and so on) Once you have created a profile Last.FM will make music recommendations to you which you can save to your profile, ban from ever hearing again, or simply skip to hear at another time.

That was not as easy as I thought it’d be. If you don’t fully understand what Last.FM is then you should visit their site and make an account. You will need to install a plug-in to take full advantage of the service however that is optional.

Last.FM Webservices

RJ and the guys at Last.FM have released a web service to access the music data stored in each user’s profile. Through a the web service a third-party application can control the radio stream and the data collecting service. Not only is Last.FM awesome to being with but developers can create custom applications to work with it! Last weekend I did it - I wrote a custom application to control my Last.FM stream.

Eric’s Last.FM Application

Until the web services go from the dev server to a production server I will not be posting the application. Right now we are testing it under several different scenarios and squashing all of the bugs. I’m only having one issue with the web service now…when I call certain functions via a POST it crashes. Well, it’s not as serious as it sounds. I have it narrowed down to the session variable isn’t making it to the server for who knows what reason. Anyway, check back here in a few days or a week at the latest for my custom Last.FM controller. Until then start building up your profile so that you can take full advantage of all of the features!