Last.fm tagging

Thursday, Mar 19. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

In the week and a half since we shipped Songbird 1.1, what have we been up to?  Well besides grandly horking a whole ton of iPods (sorry sorry sorry!), we’ve also been planning and scheming on some cool new stuff for the future.  Quite frankly, while doing performance and feature parity stuff is always good – we wanted to work on something innovative and different. Matt did a bunch of awesome mockups and threw up a planning doc on the wiki for anyone interesting in seeing what our [very rough] plans are.

Anyway, if you take a look you’ll see a big part of it revolves around activities, e.g. actions the user does to interact with their music.  We’re talking things like:

  • rating songs
  • making playlists
  • adding new tracks to their collection
  • tagging songs
  • etc.
We’re looking to build something that can socialise these sorts of behaviours more and share them with a group.  It’s the online equivalent of you coming over to my house, and me saying “Check out this new album I found the other day, I’ve been listening to it on repeat all day.” Not only that, it’s also about the subsequent interaction and discussion we have…. e.g. you saying “OMG. Vanilla Ice? You’ve been listening to that all day??” and then you calling up all my other friends to tell them what a loser I am.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on what happened yesterday.  Instead, let’s focus on what we’re doing today.  We’ve been thinking about what sorts of activities make sense, how people would want to share them and consume their different friends’ activities.  I happened to be fixing a couple of Last.fm Radio bugs today (random tangent: we should be pushing this live next week!), when it occurred to me we could do something neat with Last.fm tagging.  Long story short, I was able to throw together something quick today that seems to do the job:

lastfm_tagsIt throws a tag icon into the love/ban area of the faceplate, and when clicking it pops up a gratuitously-translucent panel allowing you to see the Last.fm tags applied (both by yourself and other Last.fm users).  You can add new tags, as well as delete any personal tags you’ve tagged the track with.

Ultimately it’d be nice to commit these tags into the Songbird local library so you can neat things like arbitrarily sort or filter your library based on tags but that’ll require some more bird-side work.

For now, this is a cheap and easy tagging solution that gives me a “tagging” action that we can make use of for our larger plan of socialising Songbird interactions.  The work has been committed to SVN and should be available in tonight’s nightly add-ons build.

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12 Responses to “Last.fm tagging”

  1. David Santucci Says:
    March 22nd, 2009 at 06:44

    Yes, yes, last.fm tag-based filtering would RULE! Something along the lines of boffin…

  2. cwilliams Says:
    March 23rd, 2009 at 00:52

    Loving the increased integration with Last.fm. It, combined with performance improvements, are what have won me back to Songbird. Some thoughts/issues:

    • When I first clicked tag, and saw the tag I wanted listed from other users, I clicked it thinking it would be set. Instead it opens the tag’s page on Last.fm. Seems counter intuitive to me. Perhaps left click to apply tag, middle click to open as webpage, or right click for options.

    • Saving the tags to the local library and offering tag filtering would be excellent!

    • I played a track that didn’t have the artist set, and the artist scrobbled as “Null.” Not sure if this is a Last.fm issue or one with the extension.

    • Is there a way to make the plugin check if the track was previously hearted? It seems odd to me that previously hearted tracks don’t show the heart.

    • Along the same lines, i would like it if the tag icon stayed lit if I have tagged a song. That way I know with a glance at the faceplate if the song has been tagged or not.

    • what about mass tagging? Right click -> tag.

    • maybe it’s just because I like color, but it would be nice if the faceplate icons had some color to them if they have been clicked. Matching the last.fm colors sounds good, red heart, blue tag icon. Still faded grey until clicked though…

    As far as the social sharing feature, sounds interesting. Quite frankly, personally the last thing I would want is Songbird eating more resources for something I would not use, when there is more feature parity needed that I would use. And more performance work is always welcome (at 203mb of RAM for me right now!) That said, the social feature seems like something that would definitely set Songbird apart and could be an awesome feature.

  3. vlad Says:
    March 23rd, 2009 at 04:30

    What about making this idea a bit more generic – i.e. not only tracks but Add-ons, skins etc.

  4. cwilliams Says:
    March 23rd, 2009 at 22:28

    Oh, and please keep the updates coming. It’s good to see the progress on Songbird, plus they let me know when to go grab new nightlies :)

  5. Stephen Lau Says:
    March 24th, 2009 at 15:12

    @cwilliams Thanks for the feedback! I’ve implemented something that hopefully is a little clearer… global tags will now have a + next to them you can click to have them be applied again as a user-tag. The actual name of the tag is thus always consistently a link off to a webpage while there are explicit – (remove) and + (add) action icons. These should be in tonight’s nightly addons build if you want to try it out.

    Saving the tags would be really cool, but practically speaking is outside the scope of what I’m trying to throw together semi-quickly. :)

    I do think I can have it try to remember state of the love/ban and whether or not you’ve tagged it though.

  6. Stephen Lau Says:
    March 25th, 2009 at 15:32

    Starting with tonight’s nightly, it should now remember whether you’ve loved the track in the past and update the heart icon appropriately.

  7. cwilliams Says:
    March 26th, 2009 at 09:25

    Thanks for the updates. Just tried the latest build. The +/- tag system is very well designed and works very well (much better than what I suggested :0). The loved tracks icon is working great too, looking forward to the tag icon staying activated as well.

    Any thoughts on the idea to allow mass tagging?

    JUST when I start using Last.fm, this happens:

    http://www.last.fm/group/Last.fm+Web+Services/forum/21604/_/517212

    So if I read that correctly, your going to have to change to the new APIs which will only stream to subscribers?

  8. cwilliams Says:
    March 26th, 2009 at 10:13

    Actually there appears to be a bug with the heard icon remembering its active state (using Songbird1.2.0a-1036windows-i686-msvc8 and audioscrobbler-0.4.1pre.1036). I was playing music in the background and switched to Songbird to find the current track hearted that I know I didnt heart. I tried changing the tracks using next/prev and double clicking on the playlist, and the heart was stuck on. It required a restart of Songbird to fix.

    Nothing was in the error console and I can’t provide more concrete reproduction steps yet. But it is definitely getting stuck in the “on” state.

    Noticed there were comments on the streaming changes on the newer post, will move that discussion there.

  9. cwilliams Says:
    March 28th, 2009 at 05:50

    I’ve isolated a cause (the cause, one of the causes?) for the heart icon getting “stuck” on – it gets stuck if Songbird experiences a media core error.

  10. Stephen Lau Says:
    April 7th, 2009 at 10:11

    @cwilliams – (sorry for the lack of response – I was out on vacation). any idea what caused the media core error? i’ll see if i can reproduce and nail down the heart icon state bug.

    re: the new APIs, yeah – I’ll have to update to the new APIs… and yeah, they’ll only work for Last.fm subscribers. :( sadness I know, I’m bummed too. the timing couldn’t be worse…

  11. Stephen Lau Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 11:10

    @cwilliams – Try the latest XPI, I made some changes yesterday that hopefully fix the heart icon state.

  12. cwilliams Says:
    April 25th, 2009 at 12:08

    @Stephen,

    The media core error was caused by me not having quicktime. This comp now has quicktime, so I can’t reproduce that particular case. I’ll try to test it on another comp over the weekend.

    In the meantime, I have not been able to reproduce the heart error using the latest XPI.

    Thanks again for all your work on this excellent plugin.

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