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

[Stuart Morgan]

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)
-- 
Stuart Morgan