I've started using an interesting web service called Audioscrobbler to publish information on the music I'm listening to. It works like this. You install a software agent (plugin) that knows how to interrogate your preferred digital music player to find out what's playing. In my case, that means running the plugin for iTunes on Mac OSX, but most popular software is supported. Periodically the plugin uploads the list of tracks you've played to the audioscrobbler server, which builds a page for each user (here's mine) showing what they've listened to recently, plus a bunch of statistics. (If you're off the net, the plugin caches the information until you reconnect.) The server also calculates affinity groups, and shows you recommendations based on what other people who like the same music you do are listening to.
But this is a security risk, isn't it? After all, who knows what information the plugin might be sucking off your system? Well, actually, I know! All of the plugins are open source, and I was able to read through the source code for the plugin to verify its behaviour before I installed it. And although this isn't proof of good intentions, the raw data is available under a Creative Commons license. In fact a colleague of mine is using the data in a research project.
So now you can see what I'm listening to, on my Mac or on my iPod. One warning: I'm having iTunes play through some of my favourite material each night, just to load a statistically meaningful dataset. So if it looks as if I'm listening to stuff when I ought to be sleeping, relax. Anyway, right now it's working through my Captain Beefheart collection: it's up to "Safe As Milk" on Strictly Personal. An awesome track....
Posted by geoff2 at July 15, 2005 11:41 PMGeoff, I am curious. If you were not an Apple person would you stil choose iPod as your Digital Music player? I am debating what kind of digital music palyer to ask for for my birthday.
Marion
Geoff: There are also a couple of CSS hacks, to through the track tunes right into your sight. Additionally, if you're lame like me, you can just use another way (http://goodaim.net/audioscrobbler) to throw up a JPG with the track listing.
Also, are you hip to smartplaylists? Setting frequencies for play, based on your ratings and the last time played, might help with your base data, too. (If nothing else, here are a few words on the subject: http://www.laflamme.us/art/index.php?itemid=58)
Posted by: Art at July 16, 2005 03:28 AMQuoth Marion: "If you were not an Apple person would you stil choose iPod as your Digital Music player?"
I think so, in part because of the wide range of third-party products (hardware and software) that have grown up around iTunes and the iPod. The integration with the iTunes Music Store is also impressive: I find that I buy about 40% of my music through ITMS these days.
I've used some of the alternative software - I have Winamp, Real, and Microsoft's Windows Media Player installed on my gaming PC - and none feel anything like as complete as the Apple solution. I run iTunes on my PC, too, although I only sync my iPod with my Mac because of the file system format issues.
It all comes down to the total "solution". Other companies have elements that may be individually cheaper, or higher capacity, or have some added features, but the Apple solution is easily the best.
I think Audioscrobbler is great: I've been using it for over a year now. The last.fm part of it is a great way to hear new music based on your stats.
Another program I use for music listening is the Predixis MusicMagic Mixer. It generates an audio fingerprint for each song you give it, and can then generate random, yet coherent, playlists based on a seed song (or songs). It's worth a look (although it doesn't (can't) play well with .m4p files, so that's about 40% of Geoff's collection that may have problems).
Posted by: MikeM at July 17, 2005 10:48 AMOn the subject of music players, personally, I'd go for the largest capacity generic usb mass storage player you can afford (lots of them support ogg & wma as well as mp3).
Far better value for money, and you're pretty much guaranteed to not run into compatability issues, as linux, osx & windows (incidentally in my order of preference) all support usb mass storage without the need for addition drivers/software. Just plug into your friend's machine, and play directly from the device (what's with this 'syncing'??) :)
Incidentally, anyone using linux (especially if you're using kde), check out amaroK music player, (http://amarok.kde.org/), been using it for a couple of days, and I'm really liking it (found this blog googling for 'audioscrobbler', as amaroK has built in support for it)
Posted by: Laurie at August 9, 2005 02:44 AM