that’s whacked

more last.fm goodness

Wednesday, Dec 31. 2008  –  Category: Songbird  –  9 Comments

I’ve been working on some more on hooking up the various Last.fm radio streams into a directory of sorts.  Here’s a couple screenshots of what I’ve got so far:

In both screenshots you can see I’m logged in, with shortcuts to the 4 user stations (Your Library, Your Loved Tracks, Your Neighbourhood, and Your Recommendations) at the top right.

The right hand side is currently where I’m tracking a bunch of results… namely your most recently listened to stations, Last.fm recommended artist stations, your top tags’ stations, your top artist’s stations, as well as your friends and neighbours’ stations.

The main content area currently has a big honkin’ search box, and lets you search by artists, tags, and groups.

The first screenshot shows my Last.fm recommended artists on the right hand side, and on the left hand side it shows the results of searching for “killers”.  Every station has a quick “Play” link to immediately start playing the radio station… or you can click on the name/photo, and it’ll take you to a detail page, which is what I’ve shown in the second screenshot.

The detail page varies slightly depending on what you’re looking at:

• For artists, it will show the top tags applied to that artist, as well as artists Last.fm thinks are similar.
• For tags, it will show similar/related tags, as well as the top artists tagged with that tag.
• For users (which are the result of searching for a group, or when you click on your friends/neighbours in the right hand nav), it will show their top tags and top artists.
• In all views, clicking on the large detail photo/name of the station will take you off to the Last.fm webpage for that station for more information.

I’ve been playing with it all last night and today, and it’s pretty amazing jumping around from friends->tags->artists->tags->groups, etc. etc. etc. and just exploring the wealth of music available on Last.fm.

The UI undoubtedly needs polish and the eye of someone with better design skills than I… so I expect it’ll undergo some visual redesign as I get more feedback… but so far I’m quite pleased with this.  This extension is written all in JS, with all the UI done in HTML + jQuery, so it’s been quite easy to throw together (with fancy animations, natch).