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Last.fm turns 20

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Re: Last.fm turns 20

#141

Post by jasonkester »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #138
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…

Does it really not maintain a cache of songs that I played three minutes ago?

My beef with Apple Music is that they can’t even be bothered to cache the whole song that you’re listening to.

The number of times that I’ve started playing an album on my phone then had it stop the instant I drive out of WiFi range. You had a whole minute to download three megabytes over fibre and didn’t even bother. 5G is ubiquitous and perfect everywhere, right? It sure is in the Bay Area where all us apple engineers live, so how about we cache, say, one second of audio in case somebody goes through a tunnel or something.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#142

Post by ibz »

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 still have that 100GB+ music collection on my laptop, all curated by myself (with the help of last.fm), organized in folders and with proper ID3 tags, which I spent years building when I was young and had no better things to do.

And you know what? This is the very reason why I never got on spotify or any of that stuff. I just don't see why I would give up the perfect (for me) collection and use some online service where I have no guarantee that I could even listen to the same track a year later.

I have music that I like and listen to, and I like to keep listening to it.

In addition to a large mp3 collection, I am also buying CDs and vinyls. Everything I can to build my own music library. The only online service I use for listening is YT, which has some unique content (live shows that are not found as albums) - but even these, I tend to download and save, because you never know...

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#143

Post by happyjack »

I still use last.fm. While I don't find use it's suggestion algorithms or radio function, I think it's amazing to look back at a particular time in my life and see what I was listening too. Or to show people via my profile what kind of music I like.

The only thing I'd wish it'd do is update my play counts from my Sony Walkman NWA.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#144

Post by iamacyborg »

willbes wrote: post #82
calvinmorrison wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I put in Silver Jews, and expected to get probably the #1 result "Purple Mountains" which is also David Berman, and then pavement and some Malkmus as recommends. So I don't know how well that works. Coheed and Cambria seemed fairly good. I was expecting Thursday as a top result and got it. I put in "Mom Jeans" and a totally very different sounding band but on the same label who tour together and got "Just Friends"…

Yeah, Last.fm is really good for playing a playlist from a single scene. It's not necessarily a single genre, just bands who tour together, or guest on each other's tracks. They used to go pretty deep too, like bringing in bands from 20 years before that influenced the current one. It's not necessarily the greatest for bands that are selling out stadiums as there's too much interference from Clear Channel, but it's g…

You have to now wonder how much of last.fm has since become tainted by faulty recommendations coming via Spotify and co though.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#146

Post by distances »

ibz wrote: post #142
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 still have that 100GB+ music collection on my laptop, all curated by myself (with the help of last.fm), organized in folders and with proper ID3 tags, which I spent years building when I was young and had no better things to do. And you know what? This is the very reason why I never got on spotify or any of that stuff. I just don't see why I would give up the perfect (for me) collection and use so…

I had it the same way. I even built my own playback statistics service since Last.fm/Audioscrobbler were too limited to my taste.

Then I just lost interest in updating my music library. Didn't want to pirate any more, I did buy a new CD every now and then but couldn't be bothered to do the EAC ripping + tagging even for them. So I kept listening to the old collection without hearing much new music. And then I switched to Spotify to get the new music conveniently.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#147

Post by dairylee »

warp wrote: post #18
paulryanrogers wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone found a better scrobbling service? Preferably that one can self host?

https://listenbrainz.org/ is open source (from the MusicBrainz ppl), though not really intended for self-hosting.

You can import your Last.fm history over to ListenBrainz too. Most of the 'scrobbling' apps will work with ListenBrainz also.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#148

Post by shepherdjerred »

jasonkester wrote: post #141
shepherdjerred wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does it really not maintain a cache of songs that I played three minutes ago? My beef with Apple Music is that they can’t even be bothered to cache the whole song that you’re listening to. The number of times that I’ve started playing an album on my phone then had it stop the instant I drive out of WiFi range. You had a whole minute to download three megabytes over fibre and didn’t even bother. 5G is ubiquitous and p…

Apple Music had different but similar problems regarding caching when I used it, which is why I ultimately moved away from it.

I did absolutely love the Dolby Atmos music though. I hope that catches on.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#149

Post by sph »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #90
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…

Two things I like to see trailed in music recommendation algorithms would be: 1. Associations happen at a song level. At the moment when artists are recommended you get what I call the "Red Hot Chilli Peppers" effect. That is, the artist that basically everyone seems to have in common in their playlists is RHCP. Instead, I think the recommendations should be more granular, at a song level. Artists can diverge quite w…

> Weight follow on plays more highly

What if I listen to Black Sabbath and then my niece wants to listen to the Peppa Pig soundtrack after that? What if it's a party and everyone is queueing their favourite song?

The issue with recommendation engines is that they're dumb as rocks. They cannot tell that the Trentemoller remix might be related to War Pigs, but not Peppa Pig, without ears and a brain.

So, to be safe, they go for simple statistical aggregation which creates safe and boring recommendations that are unable to surface interesting connections.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#150

Post by vintermann »

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…

Well, last.fm has been around for 20 years, but at the outset they took no consideration that two "artists" might have the same name. And they still haven't come up with a better solution than relying on users to edit in things like "There are at least 4 artists with the name David Williams".

So, forgive me for thinking their recommendation algorithm may not be exactly state of the art either. There's no inherent reason a recommendation algorithm shouldn't be able to figure out that an omission is intentional.

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