libre.fm

After the last last.fm redesign, it’s been speculated that last.fm probably isn’t going to survive much longer.  It’s sad, but it’s difficult to see what the business idea with last.fm is these day.  And the way they’re chopping the useful features is weird.

For instance, I’ve been using the events page for years to time my holidays.  If I’m going to, say, Berlin, I’ll scope out what’s going on on nearby dates to see whether I should go there a bit earlier or a bit later.  But then they removed the option to change the location: You can only look at the events that are “nearby”, based on the IP address of where you’re browsing from.

It’s…  it’s…

Even more absurd is that the functionlity is still there.  They’ve just removed the user interface.  If you Google the latitude and longtitude of a place, and enter them in the URL, it’ll tell you the events: http://www.last.fm/events?latlong=-33.865143,151.209900 in Sydney.

Eh?

Anyway, somebody mentioned libre.fm, which is apparently an old, free clone of last.fm.  Sort of.  There a nice Python GUI script that’ll extract your old scrobbles from last.fm and upload them to libre.fm.  It works perfectly.  Takes a while, though.

libreThe feature set is kinda not there.  It’ll list your scrobbles, and do some statistics.  And that’s it.  No events, no discovery, no nothing.  Except some free music they’re pushing.

If you look at the commits, it’s pretty dead.  So it kinda seems rather pointless.

Everything is bad.

Even More Ears 2016

All Ears 2016

 

last.fm scrobbling problems

The past few months, I’ve noticed that only a fraction of the music I’ve been playing has been scrobbling on last.fm.  But I just put this down to general last.fm flakiness — I think everybody pretty much assumes that they’re closing any time soon after the last disasterous redesign (where all the useful functionality disappeared (but we got a mobile-friendly design)).

But last night I noticed something:

lastThe only things that scrobbled were tracks I’ve ripped from vinyl!  The only things that didn’t scrobble were tracks ripped from CDs!  So I traced the Emacs scrobble library and saw that the only difference was that with CD tracks, scrobble.el sent over the CDDB ID when scrobbling, and with vinyl tracks, it naturally didn’t.  Because no such data existed.

I commented out the CDDB ID stuff, and then everything started scrobbling perfectly.

When I send over API calls with the CDDB ID set, no errors are reported, but the scrobbles are silently discarded later, and do not show up in the library.

So…  A bug introduced during the redesign or something?  I don’t know.  Since that data is superfluous, anyway, it’s no big deal.  And since last.fm is probably closing, nothing matters.

Boo hoo.

TSP1986: Zastrozzi: A Romance

I’m apparently part of the Tilda Swinton Underground now, where we swap rare, unavailable Tilda Swinton TV series and shorts.

Or something. In any case, I got a copy of this 1986 British TV series from a kind reader. It’s rather good. Bits of it are brilliant. And some bits, er, aren’t. Have a peek here.

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If you happen to have stuff that I’ve been unable to find (marked on this page with “-“), please let me know at larsi@gnus.org.