Audioscrobbling

Sunday, August 15, 2004

A few weeks ago I signed up for Audioscrobbler which, with the help of a plugin for your audio-player of choice (iTunes here), aggregates your listening habits and then, via Last.FM, creates for you a personalized radio station made up entirely of songs that match your musical tastes.

Pretty nifty stuff.  Friend and co-worker D has already pointed out that its ability to find other users with similar tastes coincidentally linked us to each other unknowingly.  Here’s my page where you can view my profile and listen to my radio station.

The plugin is far less invasive than KungTunes, which I’ve previously been using to update the currently-playing song on the sidebar over there and which uploads the track information via ftp to my server every 5 minutes.  So I rarely have KungTunes running anymore since it always seems to slow my system down.

Anyone know a way to get Audioscrobbler’s “currently playing song” info onto my site via RSS, PHP or other three-letter acronym?

(I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with some type of HAM-radio HAMburglar and “Scrobble! Scrobble!” joke, but to no avail...)


Comments

8-16-04 · 12:46 am

Zombie Claire says:

Your precious Puns fail you.

Papa Martz would have a Pun.

YOU’LL NEVER BE THE GREATEST LUTHOR, LEX!!!!!!
-----

8-16-04 · 6:38 pm

Paul Mayne says:

I too have been looking for a way to get the RSS data to display the current song playing on my site. Though I have noticed that the RSS file does not update as frequently as the user page does with current song.

8-17-04 · 12:12 pm

dfdsf says:

http://www.myrss.com

8-17-04 · 3:43 pm

D says:

There was at least one MT plugin for displaying RSS feeds, but I can’t even remember the name of the MT plugin repository site. Hot damn am I helpful! The problem with including an RSS file is that audioscrobbler’s site is so slow, and it will drag your pageload time down with it. So if you go RSS-style, make sure whatever you use has the ability to cache the file locally.

Also, you may want to try Recent Tunes - apparently it’
s less resource-intensive than KungTunes. However, I found it a little buggy.

(Little bug report: if you click ‘preview’ when commenting here, the preview page loads with personal info forgotten.)

8-17-04 · 4:18 pm

Robot Johnny says:

You’re the second person to note the preview problem—I guess I should get on that!