fling93 loves fishies

Audioscrobbler Update & MusicMobs

I previously blogged on Audioscrobbler in an earlier post. Basically, you download a plugin for your MP3 player, and it automatically keeps track of which songs, artists, and albums you listen to the most. The idea being that you can find other users with similar tastes to discover new artists (and it protects your privacy — you only provide a username, not an e-mail address).

They’ve recently moved to a new server, so there’ve been some hiccups. Not all of the original functionality has been restored (e.g., forums, generated list of users similar to you, searching for artists), but it’s getting there. And shortly after I blogged on them, their server went down for a while, and after they came up, they’d changed the protocol, requiring users to download a new plugin. For a while, I ran into a few issues with the Winamp plugin’s song submissions, but the latest one (v1.1.4, Build 589) seems to be stable. As always, you can see what I’ve been listening to here.

In addition, the iTunes (Mac version only) plugin is now available again (iScrobbler, and the developer even has a blog here), to go along with their plugins for Winamp 2.x and 5.x, Windows Media Player 9, XMMS, and a few other players I’ve never heard of. I’ve just installed iScrobbler, and it seems to be sorta working, but it seems to get confused, submitting songs multiple times. I’m still an Apple novice, so I have no idea where the heck it installed its files, since it doesn’t show up in the iTunes Plug-ins directory under Library. Oh well, I’ll figure it out later.

An alternative for iTunes users is Musicmobs. It looks slicker, but it doesn’t work quite the same way. You still register your own account (note, it’ll ask you for an e-mail address, but you aren’t required to fill it in). But instead of monitoring what you listen to automatically, you upload your iTunes xml file, which includes data that says what you’ve listened to and when. But their stats won’t update unless you upload it again, so you need to repeat this periodically.

You can take a look at my stats here. Yes, I’ve listened to Michelle Branch’s “Breathe” an embarrassing number of times — mostly because I bought it from the iTunes store and can’t play it on Winamp on my desktop cuz of Apple’s proprietary DRM. There’s no Winamp plugin that can play an iTunes store song — indeed, there’s no way to play them on anything other than iTunes (of course, this can be circumvented by burning the songs to CD and reripping them, but this process is lossy — perhaps not so much if you use AAC again). I suppose I could use iTunes for Windows, but I’m fond of a couple of Winamp plugins, like RoboDJ, so I’m really not willing to do that.

Musicmobs doesn’t have the nice bar graph of your most frequently played artists like Audioscrobbler, but it’s easier to browse through artists (complete with album cover art), and clicking on a song will bring it up in the iTunes store, which is kinda nice. It also has just a 7,000 song limit, but the service is currently in Beta, so I’d imagine they’d address that at some point (not that it’s a problem for me since I just have 4,000 songs).

The interesting thing about gathering these stats is that some users treat it as a contest of who can play the most songs, often inflating their stats by leaving their music players play for hours or days while unattended. This sorta thing is inevitable, but the services could probably address this somewhat by not counting the actual number of plays, but the number of users and the percentage of listening time each user devotes to each artist. I’ve also noticed on Audioscrobbler that a few artists have very long track names that are basically an advertisement for various Internet radio stations, which could be prevented by removing duplicate songs. Perhaps a closer integration with MusicBrainz might help?

Well, I guess it’s easy enough for me to suggest more work for other people to do while I’m idly sitting here trying to boost the playcount of my non-Michelle Branch artists. Happy listening, everybody!