Comments on: The Last Word in Listening

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:40:17 +0000

Be careful if you join up and let the Last.fm software download on to your “working” computer. After joining, I began to notice that the Last.fm program would open whenever I launched pro tools. And, suddenly I couldn’t open any of my pro tools sessions. I uninstalled and reinstalled without success. Finally I found information on Digidesign’s website about the “NeoAccess Error” I was getting. I had to trash files from the Digidesign Databases folder as it turned out they became corrupt.

Just a heads up. I haven’t found any specific information regarding what heppened with my system after joining Last.fm.

By: Steve Layton

Steve Layton — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:56:15 +0000

All of these streaming and download services are completely centered — just like the music industry as a whole — around the classic pop format of “song/album”, and it’s been that way since I’ve been using them on the web (just over 10 years now). Same kind of nightmares with genre-labeling, something that’s unfortunately become all-pervasive as well.

It’s not always the fault of the service; if they get an opera CD from the label, that’s divided into tracks for every snippet of recitative , aria, chorus, etc., that’s how they’ll end up offering it. iTunes also has the habit of making any CD track that’s longer than ten minutes only available if you download the entire album. (Lately iTunes has been adding an option to some CDs, that lets you purchase, say, the three movements of a work together, separately from the other works on the same CD, for a price intermediate between the cost of a single track and a full CD.)

By: Richard Friedman

Richard Friedman — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:20:08 +0000

I think Pandora.com (here in Oakland) does a better job. But unfortunately they consider a track on a CD to be a “song” and follow the digital rights legislation that prohibits two tracks from the same CD to appear in the same hour. For classical multi-movement pieces this can be a bit frustrating. But I’ve been amazed at what they have in their collection. And they will accept CDs from independents as long as they have a bar-code on them so they can enter it into their system.

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:49:13 +0000

Thanks for the tip off, it’s often hard to keep up with these things.
I have also found a page, for Robin, and can now look into it further!

By: marcus

marcus — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:06:22 +0000

I dont think there are no wordpress plugins. There is no other way for me to show Playlists on my blog.

By: Steve Layton

Steve Layton — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:33:46 +0000

The classical selection is probably much greater now than what you remember. I was listening yesterday to Feldman, Adams, Gorecki, Xenakis, Andriessen, Scelsi, Saariaho, Reich, Gann, Polansky… even Jeff Harrington!

By: Galen H. Brown

Galen H. Brown — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:18:36 +0000

To me one of the most interesting features of LastFM has always been the “play music by artists like _____” feature. It didn’t work great the last time I used it, but that was probably a year ago, and these things improve, and unlike traditional radio you can skip anything you don’t like. Its ability to find classical music was especially limited, but on the other hand I had good luck finding interesting artists I didn’t know by listening to artists that LastFM deemed “like” Radiohead and other rock bands.

It’s great that they’re adding the ability to find specific tracks — that will make them a lot more useful to me, since one thing I constantly want to do is have a quick and easy no-risk way to check out an artist I’ve heard about but don’t know.

By: David Toub

David Toub — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:25:46 +0000

Thanks Frank. I have heard the same thing, that music gets misclassified on lastfm. But that’s the reality with anything like this—it’s only as accurate as the input, which is a function of how careful people are and their particular subjective classification schemes.

By: Erin

Erin — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:01:18 +0000

I’ve found that my classical music MP3s, even from iTunes, aren’t named very clearly for Last.fm, and it never seems to match up with anything else on there. Though I haven’t been tagging much. Maybe that’s the secret.

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 04:46:11 +0000

Yes, Last.fm took over/merged with the Audioscrobbler service. (iScrobbler was the OS X client, I think an unofficial one. There’s an official Last.fm client for Mac now.) I use Last.fm primarily to record what I listen to on iTunes and my iPod, not so much for recommendations, which are somewhat flaky IMO. (Right now Last.fm is recommending Brahms, Mendelssohn, etc., to me, among other things, which is strange because I listen to little or no 19th century classical music.)

One interesting feature of the Last.fm client is the ability to play a selection of tracks tagged in certain ways by users. For example, there’s a “contemporary classical” tag (also a separate “classical contemporary” tag, along with other variants). As with the recommendations, this is sometimes hit and miss. (For example, why did 14 people tag Mahler this way?)