more last.fm goodness

Wednesday, Dec 31. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

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).

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22 Responses to “more last.fm goodness”

  1. GeekShadow Says:
    January 1st, 2009 at 17:57

    This is awesome :) Do the lastfm add-on nightly run on Genesis or do I need Hendrix nightly ?

    I’m working on ubiquity to be compatible with Songbird : http://www.flickr.com/photos/geekshadow/3157515331/

  2. Stephen Lau Says:
    January 1st, 2009 at 18:26

    I haven’t committed the changes to SVN yet, though they’re in my Hg repo @ http://nightingale.songbirdnest.com/lastfm

    You can grab a test XPI @ http://whacked.net/scratch/audioscrobbler-latest.xpi if you want to try it out.

  3. Stephen Lau Says:
    January 1st, 2009 at 18:26

    BTW – Ubiquity on Songbird looks awesome!! can’t wait to see it :)

  4. noahness Says:
    January 1st, 2009 at 20:40

    Testing out the plug-in you posted above and it’s amazing! Works as advertised. You did a great job. Thanks for putting in the time.

  5. Robert Cudmore Says:
    January 3rd, 2009 at 10:25

    When I install the -latest.xpi (also when I tried 0.3.4pre) Songbird tells me that the plugin is not compatible with Songbird 1.0.0 ?

    Any hints?

  6. Robert Cudmore Says:
    January 3rd, 2009 at 10:40

    By the way, I am on a mac (10.5.5)

  7. stevel Says:
    January 3rd, 2009 at 11:29

    yeah you have to be running a 1.1.0pre nightly build in order to use it currently

  8. Robert Cudmore Says:
    January 3rd, 2009 at 16:21

    Thanks a ton, I got the Songbird 1.1 nightly build and your plugin works like a charm. Please continue on this project. As of today I have converted to Songbird with your plugin (what is its name?) and thrown away iTunes and the last.fm player.

  9. boosh Says:
    January 3rd, 2009 at 16:42

    stevel… I Love You!

  10. Elijah Grey Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 13:59

    Works great but the interface (especially the logo) is a little weird on Windows using any theme including the default Gonzo theme.

  11. Elijah Grey Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 13:59

    Screenshot: http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/2163/sblastfmtp8.th.png

  12. koppah Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 14:35

    Any chance we could have the scrobbling delay also configurable? I’ve posted a request on getsatisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/configuringaudioscrobbling), but noone replied to me. Basically, I’d like to be able to configure when Songbird scrobbles a song for me. I often play my entire library on random and I don’t want every song I’m skipping through to be scrobbled unless I actually stay on that song an listen to it. The official client supports this, but I can’t find it anywhere in Songbird…

  13. VA Loans Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 14:52

    Thanks a lot for the songbird. Works great.

  14. Stephen Lau Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 15:21

    koppah – Sorry, to conform to the scrobbling protocol – you’re not supposed to selectively scrobble tracks. Though that being said, Songbird shouldn’t be scrobbling songs that you only listen to momentarily. It’s supposed to only scrobble if the song has been halfway played, or if 4 minutes of playtime have occurred.

  15. koppah Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 15:27

    Hmmm ok I’ll have a closer look at it. Also if that is the case with the protocol, why is it that the official client violates that, then? ;)

  16. Yeshu'a Says:
    January 9th, 2009 at 04:50

    Hey man, this add-on rocks a lot Something like making lists and add tags coming out?

  17. Lukes Says:
    January 11th, 2009 at 15:08

    great! looking forward to it ! any ideas on release?

  18. Stephen Lau Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 08:30

    No ETA yet; we’re redesigning the directory pages – so it’s confined just to the test XPI I linked above for now.

  19. Seb Says:
    January 17th, 2009 at 11:55

    An addon of songbird “The lastfm sidebar” indicate the last played songs.

    Suggest : I Mean that a left panel can indicate the songs of the lastfm’s playlist

    for exemple : the songs who are indicate in this webpage : http://www.lastfm.fr/user/name of user]/library/playlists

    It’s the same in mediamonkey with the lastfm nodes who indicate the content of lastfm user’s playlist.

    Can you integrate that in the future lastfm integration ?

  20. streetdaddy Says:
    February 18th, 2009 at 18:00

    I’ve installed 1.2.0a Nightly Build and it says the plugin is not compatible (from http://whacked.net/scratch/audioscrobbler-latest.xpi)

    Is there a particular version of Songbird that is required?

  21. Stephen Lau Says:
    February 18th, 2009 at 20:03

    @streetdaddy Yeah – it currently requires 1.1, but if you have Nightly Tester Tools – you can override it and make it work in 1.2.0a.

    I hope to have an update out next week that has a redesigned UI that is directly compatible with 1.2.0a

  22. streetdaddy Says:
    February 18th, 2009 at 22:06

    Thanks Stephen. I will try downgrading… Otherwise I’ll just wait for your new release, hope it’s going well! This is stellar effort from yourself, I think it will really help the popularity of Songbird!

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