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

Matt S. skd5aner at gmail.com
Mon Jan 9 18:33:13 UTC 2012


On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 7:10 PM, Matt S. <skd5aner at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Paul Harrison <mythtv at sky.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>> _______________________________________________
>> mythtv-dev mailing list
>> mythtv-dev at mythtv.org
>> http://www.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-dev
>
> I just wanted to add some additional comments about last.fm and as I'm
> a user (and fan) of the service and would love to see it integrated
> into MythMusic.
>
> Stuart focused primarily on one part of the service, which is their
> "streaming" radio capabilities - similar in nature to spotify or
> pandora.  But in general, I rarely if ever use this feature and most
> people would say that's not really what makes last.fm unique
> (anymore). Additionally, they do have a recommendation engine - but
> I'm not sure if I've really seen players take advantage of that and
> leverage it via the API.
>
> What I do leverage is scrobbling - which allows my various players
> (itunes, ipod, android, winamp, etc) to send playcounts to my account.
>  This keeps track of my overall library, and allows me to see
> statistics on listening.  For example - most played artist this week,
> month, year - most played track, etc.  There are third party sites
> that leverage the API that can take the statistics way beyond what you
> can see on the last.fm site.  For me, it's pretty fun to see what
> trends in listening I have, when I started listening to a new artist,
> periods where a particular genre ruled my listening, when I
> rediscovered an artist, etc.
>
> As for scrobbling - it's nice because it's a collective of all my
> playcounts regardless of player - it would be nice for mythmusic to
> join that mix since anything I listen to in there effectively falls
> into a black whole as far as my total playcount goes.  I think it's
> the only player I use on a frequent basis that won't scrobble.  If
> someone is interested in starting, that's probably the best feature to
> try and work on.
>
> Additionally - the API can expose a bunch of metadata on the track,
> album, and artist.  This could be particularly useful to do things
> similar to how metadata and artwork is exposed for videos and
> recordings.  You could grab pictures of the artist
> (http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=407), folksonomy tags, and even
> wiki like descriptions of the artist/album/track.
>
> Also, it's come up a few times in the past, but I think there's a huge
> potential to leverage various musicbrainz capabilities too.  In fact,
> last.fm and musicbrainz are re-kindling a long time partnership to
> make sure that all the tracks, artists, and albums leverage the MBID.
> This helps eliminate ambiguity when both scrobbling as well as
> retrieving data.  All of my tracks have an MBID, and between
> leveraging the last.fm and musicbrainz APIs, you could get just about
> any piece of data you could imagine.  I think there's a lot of
> potential in terms of leveraging MB and last.fm in combination for
> tagging and metadata supplementation.
>
> Thanks again for all your hard work on MythMusic so far Paul - I know
> it's been a long time coming and there are a lot of people who are
> grateful for you contributions!
>
> Thanks!
> Matt

BTW - I stumbled across this Qt/C++ library written and supported by
last.fm - https://github.com/mxcl/liblastfm

Matt


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