01 March 2008

AspyPlayer BETA
Audioscrobbler (Last.fm) PyS60 Player

I am Not that much into music and I am not an expert really, but it just appeared in my feed reader and I thought it can be interesting for some of you.

Thanks to the Douglas Fernando da Silva, from the Random Thoughts About Nothing (Usually) So Simple blog, S60 users gets their first taste of Last.fm functionality.

Douglas has released an early beta version of his open source application developed in Python that allows users to scrobble tracks to Last.fm as they play on an S60 device.

This is the first release and AspyPlayer is still in the early beta phase and currently it only supports scrobbling. da Silva is currently working on the UI further improvements and than he’ll start with adding more features. He is back to Python after the 5 years and he definitely need some more time to optimize the code and improve the UI as well.

Speaking of the Last.fm, it is the UK-based internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002 and it is the now world's largest social music platform as they claims.

Using a music recommendation system known as "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user's computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rightsholder has previously authorised it. Registration is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations