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Last.fm turns 20

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Re: Last.fm turns 20

#131

Post by chunk_waffle »

mattl wrote: post #75
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #69

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.

Is libre.fm still stuck on PHP 5 or are the docs just out dated?

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/librefm.git/tree/gnufm_ins...

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#132

Post by ehsankia »

djhworld wrote: post #54

Last.fm died (as in for me personally) when I stopped cultivating my own music library. I used to have gigabytes of MP3s and FLACs, all neatly organised into folders, usually by artist/album, and meticulously maintained ID3 tags. All played through software like Winamp with the audioscrobbler plugin, or iTunes when I had my beloved iPod classic. All of that drifted away as I got older, and the dawn of streaming servi…

I only ever used Last.FM for stats/tracking purposes, and it still does that great across platforms. I have an android app which reports music from any media app I use, and similarly have a chrome extension for desktop. I still find it incredibly valuable, knowing what I listened when, get breakdowns and so on. How else could I tell which were my top 5 favorite artists in 2013?

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#133

Post by Semaphor »

Great time to reinstall the plugin that lets my media player scrobble to last.fm ;)

A bit of a shame that MyMedia for Alexa (local music streaming for Alexa) doesn’t support it, but at least that’s only for the kitchen anyway.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#134

Post by kixiQu »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #38
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

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…

I've found most recommendation systems in general don't grasp the distinctions in genre that are in metal, or the stylistic differences. Most stuff is just tagged "METAL", when there is a huge difference between grind, funeral doom, or atmo-black. Even within a genre there can be differences it doesn't really capture, like tech-death: you might call Beyond Creation and Warp Chamber both tech-death, but in reality the…

How do you find the https://everynoise.com/ categories to fare at this?

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#135

Post by stryan »

kerblang wrote: post #102
ep103 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the way music-map.com works, and it is absolutely fantastic. But no, that is NOT the way these other services recommend things. Spotify, for example, recommends music that it thinks is related, but not necessarily liked by both groups of people. For example, a person who likes Black Sabbath, and really technical instrumental metal, probably doesn't like the comparatively simpler slipknot. While some people who…

> For example, a person who likes Black Sabbath, and really technical instrumental metal, probably doesn't like the comparatively simpler slipknot That's just thinly disguised metal snobbery. Almost all metalheads adore Black Sabbath, because they wrote fantastic songs . Sabbath's music caught on because it's so accessible. They were certainly good musicians, but by no means anywhere near the top of the Technical Sop…

> That's just thinly disguised metal snobbery. Almost all metalheads adore Black Sabbath, because they wrote fantastic songs

I think you might have misunderstood the parent a bit. They're not saying Black Sabbath is really technical instrumental metal but that someone who listens to Black Sabbath AND ALSO likes really technical instrumental, is probably not looking to listen to Slipknot (though I suppose that could depend on the technical to Black Sabbath ratio).

The point is more that Spotify supposedly recommends without taking into account what people actually listen to. Spotify says "oh this person listens to Black Sabbath which is a popular metal band. They also listen to a lot of Blotted Science, which is also a metal band. They most likely will like Slipknot, another popular metal band" instead of "This person listens to Black Sabbath and Blotted Science. People who listen to both Black Sabbath and Blotted Science also listen to Nile, so this person will most likely like Nile"[0].

[0] Blotted Science and Nile are the only technicalish bands I know off the top of my head. If those bands don't work, try Blind Guardian and Stormkeep

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#136

Post by majormajor »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #51
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

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…

I had always assumed that recommendation algorithms didn't work on genres, but instead did a lookup based on something like: "You like X" "Person Y also likes X" "Person Y also likes Z" "I should recommended Z to you" (proportional to the number of people there are who liked X and Z, compared to other options) If this is the case (and perhaps I'm wrong), it's nothing to do with the algorithm not understanding the sub…

> It's not that the algo is any worse than human recommendations, it's just that it's an average of all humans likes, which will never fit your exact personal unique preferences because they aren't you.

Isn't that the definition of "worse"? "Never able to be tailored to your unique preferences" when a human could take that feedback in a single sentence and adjust? It's like the old "everyone wants to remake Excel since they realize 80% of users only use 20% of it... without realizing it's always a different 20%" saw...

I believe that you certainly could figure out a smarter approach, with enough careful thought, domain knowledge, and effort but... I haven't used any services that do it. Surface level similarities seems to be all you get, and I constantly get recommendations that a human would've stopped giving me years ago.

Maybe the domain of expert-level statisticians and experts-at-musical-knowledge-of-many-genres just don't overlap that much? It's hard to imagine you could do it truly well without content-level processing, not just user histories and connection graphs.

Just because no streaming service could afford a human to be an expert on every single user doesn't mean that the cheaper, more scalable algorithm isn't worse.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#137

Post by emodendroket »

majormajor wrote: post #136
SimonPStevens wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had always assumed that recommendation algorithms didn't work on genres, but instead did a lookup based on something like: "You like X" "Person Y also likes X" "Person Y also likes Z" "I should recommended Z to you" (proportional to the number of people there are who liked X and Z, compared to other options) If this is the case (and perhaps I'm wrong), it's nothing to do with the algorithm not understanding the sub…

> It's not that the algo is any worse than human recommendations, it's just that it's an average of all humans likes, which will never fit your exact personal unique preferences because they aren't you. Isn't that the definition of "worse"? "Never able to be tailored to your unique preferences" when a human could take that feedback in a single sentence and adjust? It's like the old "everyone wants to remake Excel sin…

I mean, maybe it's not worse though. Maybe others would find what the other guy wants too narrow. There's a tension between only playing stuff you are 100% going to like and actually introducing you to stuff you haven't listened to.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#138

Post by shepherdjerred »

djhworld wrote: post #54

Last.fm died (as in for me personally) when I stopped cultivating my own music library. I used to have gigabytes of MP3s and FLACs, all neatly organised into folders, usually by artist/album, and meticulously maintained ID3 tags. All played through software like Winamp with the audioscrobbler plugin, or iTunes when I had my beloved iPod classic. All of that drifted away as I got older, and the dawn of streaming servi…

I'm the opposite!

I've used Spotify (and other streaming apps) for years. I finally got tired that there was no streaming app that:

* Worked well with Sonos

* Provided high quality music

* Had good automatic caching of music *note below*

I tried Spotify, TIDAL, and Apple Music before giving up and putting my library on Plex + Plexamp.

*note*: Why is Spotify SO BAD when it comes to caching. It's so strange. There are so many situtations where it doesn't work, but it should.

I have the entire contents of an album (but not the album itself) on playlist. The playlist is downloaded offline. Spotify doesn't let me search or play the songs in the album unless I navigate to the playlist.

If I just played a song on data, and I lose my connection and try to re-play it, Spotify won't let me! Does it really not maintain a cache of songs that I played three minutes ago?

Search becomes entirely useless when you're transitioning from WiFi to mobile data. This happened to me _every_ _single_ _time_ that I would get into my car and start music before driving. Spotify would refuse to let me do anything until I disabled WiFi.

Spotify has to be one of the worst widely used applications.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#139

Post by flerp »

I love last.fm, always have been. Started out using the winamp plugin in 2007. I even synced my ipod regularly through itunes & the scrobbler to get stats.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#140

Post by [deleted] »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #51
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

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…

I had always assumed that recommendation algorithms didn't work on genres, but instead did a lookup based on something like: "You like X" "Person Y also likes X" "Person Y also likes Z" "I should recommended Z to you" (proportional to the number of people there are who liked X and Z, compared to other options) If this is the case (and perhaps I'm wrong), it's nothing to do with the algorithm not understanding the sub…

[deleted]
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