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

[Paul Harrison]

On 09/01/12 18:33, Matt S. wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 7:10 PM, Matt S. <skd5aner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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

Yeah thanks for that. There is a lot of interesting stuff we could use
like the recommendations, coverart, fingerprinting, related urls etc.
Their library looks interesting and will make things a little easier to
implement and it uses Qt which we already use anyway. I will probably
look at adding something in the near future but for the moment there are
more important things to finish before 0.25 is out.

Paul H