fling93 loves fishies

Audioscrobbler

Most tools for discovering new music and new artists rely on the user rating a bunch of artists they like and dislike. Well, Audioscrobbler does this for you by keeping track of what you listen to. Using a Winamp plugin (although version 3 was worse than 2, I’ve heard the newly-released version 5 is better), it checks for songs you actually listen to (it makes sure you actually play at least half of the song, thus filtering out songs you decide to skip), and then submits it to Audioscrobbler’s server where statistics are kept on how often you’ve played each artist. You can then use this to discover other users who listen to the same artists.

By the way, this is not a commercial site that will sell your name and preferences. It doesn’t even ask for your e-mail address. The whole thing is open-source. From their “About” page:

There are no popups/adverts or any other crap, Audioscrobbler plugins are all Open Source. Audioscrobbler data is periodically released under a Creative Commons License. We are striving to eliminate any possibilities of Audioscrobbler “doing a GraceNote” by periodically releasing data collected by plugins, and keeping the plugins and protocol open-source.

Personally, I haven’t actually discovered any new music from them yet (unless you count Evanescence, which I would’ve heard about eventually anyway), as the site was beginning to undergo a makeover when I first found it. Their servers were actually down for quite a while recently as they were working on hardware upgrades and such, and they finally came back up on Monday — at least to the point where they are again accepting song submissions from the plugin. The part about finding other users who listen to similar music still isn’t working yet, and neither are the forums that used to be there, but they’re working on it.

Until then, it’s still nice that when someone asks, “What music do you listen to?” you now have a convenient link as an answer (yeah, the bar graph looks clunky now, but it used to look nicer, so they’re probably working on that, too). Plus just looking at your own stats is kinda addicting. :)

Update 12/30/03

Their site keeps going up and down. They’re upgrading the protocol, so you’ll need a new plugin when they’re back up. I’ll keep you posted. Also, it seems that creating an Audioscrobbler account also creates an account at Last.fm. Just wish they would have warned me about that.

Update 1/18/03

Their iTunes plugin is back. They were up again for a while, and I have an update here.