If you have alot of music on your computer and listen to it often you might sometimes wonder if there is music out there similiar to the what you listen to. You might be limited to know the things your hear on the radio, tv and hear about from your friends. But people tend to get suprised when they really get a chance to know all the different music there is out there. And thats why a program like last.fm is a very nice thing to have on your computer.
But what does this program really do? When you install the program it installs a plugin to your favorite music player. Now when you start playing music the program start will start to scrobble what you listen too. Scrobble means that the program remembers what music you listen too and list it on last.fm under your profile. After awhile the website will start to recommend music to you and even create a radio station with the music you listen to and similiar music styles.
Last.fm is in many ways a social website like facebook.com. You add friends and can comment on their profiles. But the big different is ofcourse that the main focus here is music. You can check musical compatibility, join groups with genre’s of music and recommend music to other people. This give you a much broader access to music and learn to know all kinds of music that you maybe not would have listen to otherwise.
But last.fm depends on one thing. That your mp3’s have the corrent meta tags. Like artist, album and year. Without that information the info you submit to last.fm is useless. If you rip your cd’s in programs like windows media player or get your music from itunes then this information should allready be there. If you get your music by.. less legal means, then you should try and check if your music does have the correct information embed in them. This is not something I will go into now. But you can do that in windows media player.
Info about artists and more
A really cool feature about last.fm is that when you listen to a piece of music with last.fm is that you can get all kind of information about the artist you listen to directly in the program. A short bio about the band or artist similiar music and if you press the name of the artist or name of the song the browser will open up with the page for artist you are listing too, which will give you even more info about the band and let you comment and see other users which also listen to this music.
If you know more about a band or maybe even are the first that listen to something you can write and edit info about the band yourself and upload album covers. So if you see something that is missing in the info about a band you can go in and edit the info yourself.
Radio Station
My favorit feature is the radio station fuction. This lets you listen a station with a artist or another user’s radio which will play music that he/she listen to daily and have scrobbled to last.fm. Other users can also listen to your station this way. Even yourself. Are you sitting at a computer where you music is not on? Then just tune into your own radio station! Thats really brilliant. Ofcource you can choose which music is next as this will just play as a radio. You can however choose to skip a number if you wish. So you are not forced to listen too something as you would normally on a radio.
Last thoughts
This is a wonderful little application that really can expand on what you listen too. Just make sure you music have the correct info and soon you will get recommendations for new music. Get your friends added and see what they listen too. Join groups and learn about music that you might newer would have listen too else.
This little gem get 4 stars by me. I would really like to give it 5. But it really is just a “fluff” item and not something you really need on your computer.
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