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Last.fm turns 20

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Re: Last.fm turns 20

#71
post #63

According to my profile I'm scrobbling since 7 Aug 2007. I'm even paying for the "Pro" version just to support the site (and for the feature that allowed me to change my emberassing old user name). I don't check it very often any more but for some reason I still like to look at the graphs from time to time, even if I don't really hunt down recommendations based on that.

>> (and for the feature that allowed me to change my emberassing old user name) Still brutally pissed that after more than 10 years with the same account, and even with Premium, Reddit wont let me change my old short name, which is related to my deadname as a trans person. Of course; support requests have been completely ignored.

It took Last.fm a very long time (I believe it is only possible for a couple of years now). That's probably related to the code powering the whole site. I heard some horror stories over the years from people who worked there early on.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#72
With the onset of chronic decision fatigue, I no longer can enjoy the selection of music from my personal curation of mp3s I have stashed away over the past 25 or so years.

Knowing that I generally like the music I have, I have found some huge success with a simple change: I do not in any way allow myself to influence what music is playing.

It's very easy to do. The first version of this was done in my woodshop, because it's creepy back there: a cheap amp with a 64 gig SD card plays the first 64 gig of my music on a loop. I believe it's about a 3 week loop. Whenever I go out there to get a screw driver or drop of a bucket of old paint, there is some OC Remix collection of Legend of Zelda, or some Cowboy Bebop, or their ilk, playing at a reasonable volume. It keeps ghosts out and really increases my pleasure of being out there - just enough distraction to be able to think.

Version two is my now permanent work-from-home office. I have been exploring these Raspberry Pi audio distributions. Volumio, and now a fork of rune audio called rAudio-1. At first I was allowing myself to fall back into the same trap: selecting a folder on a NAS share of the music, but then I rediscovered Web Radio. I left it on a classical music station for a little over 4 weeks, just soft piano music at about 40 dB, barely detectable. My work microphone can't (or wont) pick it up so I let it play right through meetings.

It took me that four months to realize I could install my own web radio station of my own music. With icecast2 and mpd running on an underused virtual machine, I can leave it playing all of my music on a single stream available to only my rAudio-1. Coupled with a 60 dollar add-on DAC to (significantly) clean up the audio quality, and a 30 dollar amplifier that has only a volume knob, my situation is now perfect: I can either listen to what is playing, or I can not. If I don't like what is playing, then I either listen to it anyways, or try later. I'm listening to music 40 hours a week again, and am better for it.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#73
Been scrobbling nonstop since 2006. Discovered last.fm while digging through Amarok's settings.

So many memories, discovered genres, met friends, found a subculture where I belong (more like the subculture found me with the neighbor system)

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#74
I don't understand why Spotify or some music streaming service doesn't buy Last.fm already.

It's a pretty useful service that nobody is going to pay for unless it comes included in a streaming service already.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#75

Scrobbling is fun, just one of those 'personal data' things to look at from time to time. Last.fm was always corporate/sketchy tho and never got into it/didn't want an account on it. GNU Libre.fm worked fine for years tho! Nice to have an archive of data just sitting on there. (Lack of hands to work on it to get other features like dumps and more analysis never panned out tho). But since the pandemic my listening hab…

I put the brakes on Libre.fm a little to avoid becoming a social silo. What’s there works and people keep using it.

GNU social was a spin off, later merging with StatusNet and later Mastodon was a rewrite of GNU social in Rails.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#76
post #4

I discovered so much music through last.fm back in the day. There were so many obscure and weird bands to find in their «Related artists» and whole genres I feel I’d never have heard of if not for last.fm

Their recommendations that I got then seem leagues better than what the big modern streamers give now. For all their AI and ginourmous models, they mostly seem to be stuck on "what you listened to yesterday".

I keep pointing this out and it seems like nobody believes me.

I miss the last.fm radio so much!

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#77
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same recently after seeing it was possible. 150,000 scrobbles for me, which I thought was a lot until I saw your count! https://www.last.fm/user/carldr

Aw shucks,low compatibility. https://www.last.fm/user/unspotted

Late 90s me would have had a higher compatibility with you, there are a few blasts from my past in your scrobbles. Followed!

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#78

Still use last.fm. Most "You might like this" algorithms go straight for the low-hanging fruit, and often fail to take any kind of nuance into account. I can't tell you how many of the streaming services will see my Black Sabbath play history and immediately recommend, "If you like Black Sabbath, you should love...Slipknot!" But I've never had a real person make that mistake, because a real person who looks at my las…

There was a time when last.fm recommendations were uncannily good. I haven't used the service for a very long time so I can't say much about what they're like now or how they compare with stuff like music.youtube, Spotify or Pandora, but I recall when they were the darling "it" thing as far as music goes.

"Audio-Scrobbling"! It was hot off the end of the web 2.0 craze along with flickr and delicious. Good times. We weren't expecting the evil parts yet. I dropped off probably around 2012 or earlier.

As much as I enjoy good recs and an endless, mildly interesting playlist, the surveillance capitalism in the sauce is a real turn off.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#79
Nice to see last.fm on the front page, it brings back fun memories when we were mocking each other about leaving the player playing all night just to get the stats up.

Shameless plug: I'm a firm believer that human recommendations are superior, which is one of the reasons I'm creating https://digs.fm, something like Goodreads but for music[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#80
post #13

I used to be obsessed with Last fm when I was a teenager and was similarly obsessed with music in general. I think I moved away from it probably before my interest in music waned, if I remember right it was because something about the whole “quantify self” movement became off-putting to me. There was something weird about looking at the charts and who your top artists were the same kind of way having a top 8 friends…

It's funny how HN was really big into self-quantification during the early 2010s, I remember how there were several popular posts of people who built dashboards to log their own personal metrics. Actually I think that's still a trend that persists.
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