[mythtv] MythMusic LastFM support offering support (was Re: [mythtv-commits] mythtv/master commit: 8e2982436 by Paul Harrison (paul-h))

[Paul Harrison]

On 06/01/12 23:46, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> On Friday 06 Jan 2012 23:29:15 Paul Harrison wrote:
>> I must admit I'm still a bit ignorant at exactly what LastFM is to know
>> how best to integrate it. I've done a little reading of the LastFM
>> website and api docs. Do I take it you just want to integrate the
>> scrobbling part of the api?
> LastFM is just a flash-based radio service that tailors what is played to each 
> user based on their likes and dislikes. It's great for discovering new music 
> or just for listening to some of the music you own when you don't have your 
> mp3 player to hand. The user has no control over what tracks are played or the 
> order except to be able to 'skip' to the next item in the playlist. You 'ban' 
> a track to never hear it again or 'love' a track if you want to to appear in 
> your playlist more frequently.
>
> You can only listen to the 'radio' via their website, so it cannot be 
> integrated like Shoutcast etc. It might however be implemented similar to MNV 
> via MythBrowser, but I'll let someone else decide whether that's worthwhile.
>
> To the best of my knowledge the scrobbling API is the only one we'd reasonably 
> be interested in.  The 'scrobbler' feeds details of your music collection, how 
> often you play certain tracks and the like back to LastFM to help inform the 
> playlist choices it makes when you use the service. 
>
> They have a really great recommendations API IIRC but until we offer some sort 
> of download integration* there's no rush to implement that.
>
> (* I've given some thought to integrating services like emusic before now, but 
> they'll need to improve their API before I do)

OK thanks Stuart that's made things a lot clearer. Should be fairly easy
to hook the scrobbling into the music player. The authentication looks
like it could be a bit of a pain but nothing we can't handle. Not
something that really interests me though so not high on my todo list
but I'll offer assistance to anyone who want to look at it.

Paul H.