Posts Tagged ‘LAST.FM’

iSproggler & iScrobbler: Synchonize Your iPod & Last.fm with iTunes

May 10, 2007 – 5:05 pm
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A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, is obsessed with accuracy and research. It’s no surprise then that shortly after he starting using last.fm (I’m a big fan) to power a widget on his blog he complained about it not capturing the songs he listened to on his iPod.

After a lucky search result I came across iSproggler (for windows users) and iScrobbler (for Mac users). These utilities enable you to send playing information from iTunes to Last.fm. They also enable sending playing information from all iPod models.

You need to join either group to download the utility or click here to download iSproggler version 1.0.1.

Some of the features listed on the iSproggler group page are:

  • No restrictions on paused or repeated songs in iTunes
  • MusicBrainz Track Identifiers are submitted
  • Ability to pause and disable submissions
  • iPod support - both automatically and manually updated
  • iPod shuffle support
  • Multiple iPod play support
  • Motorola iTunes support
  • Icons indicating network and submission status
  • Exclusion rules for directories, artists and genres, podcasts and videos

Please note: I don’t have any personal experience with either plugin but if it’s good enough for my OCD friend then it’s probably good enough for anyone.

Join the appropriate last.fm group for more information on these utilities.

Posted in Entertainment | Comments (7)

PHP & Last.fm/Audioscrobbler’s API

November 9, 2006 – 10:50 am
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Like many others out there, I’ve chosen to display the album covers of my most recently listened to songs in my blog’s sidebar. It was with this expressed intention in mind that I set up a Last.fm account to start tracking my listening habits.

Present Solution

Right now I’m successfully displaying this information using Dirk’s Last.fm widget which nicely piggybacks Automatic’s Sidebar Widget. Although temporary, I’ve been very happy with this setup and I encourage anyone out there using Wordpress as a blogging platform to consider this plugin combination.

That being said, this seems like the perfect opportunity to introduce myself to API offerings from Last.fm.

Inspired in large part by J Wynia’s article on this same subject; I’ll stick to his approach and more or less follow his example to create the skeletal page he introduced about a month ago.

What’s in the Data?

Last.fm XML Data

The data available with the Last.fm API is currently accessible in four formats: Plain text, XML, XSPF and RSS.

XML is available for every displayed data offering while the other three are more sporadically available; because of that, we’ll stick to XML in our examples.

Before working with the data, you need to take a look at it of course. To do that, simply append “?wsdl” to the end of the XML URL (e.g., http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/jrob00/topalbums.xml?wsdl) and your browser (I’m using Firefox) should nicely spit out something similar to this screenshot.

Feeding PHP

Let’s take a look at a simple script to get this data into PHP. First assign the URL… Read More »

Posted in Tech/Web | Comments (11)