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last.fm & mp3 players ...
Nov. 20th, 2007 03:03 am... I've been thinking recently ... How cool would it be if you could actually scrobble tracks being played on your mp3 player?
As it is now, my last.fm profile only contains tracks that I've listened to while sitting at the PC at home. But just this past weekend, I listened through all of my La Vela Puerca collection three or four times, while at work, using my iRiver and some stereo boxes (by the end of the weekend, the battery on my player was totally dead). None of those maybe 200 tracks shows up in my profile though, which IMO is a pity.
And seriously, how hard could it be? All you'd really need is for the player software to create a log file of songs played. Grab the artist and title tags, length, add current system time, and check whether the song was skipped or fast-forwarded.
Back home you could just copy the log file to your computer, have it changed to the correct syntax for last.fm, and transfer it there in pretty much the same way as the winamp plugin does now (if it fails to connect to last.fm, it stores the data locally anyway until it gets a connection, so no difference there).
Anyway, what are the chances of actually seeing such a thing, for my player in particular? I can't even find a firmware download on their site for my player anymore, they must've stopped development years ago.
I did some googling though, and even though I couldn't find a solution for my particular player, there're actually people out there developing alternative firmware software for popular players: Rockbox. They've already got stable versions for iPods, iRivers, etc. And as far as I can tell, Rockbox does support scrobbling tracks. I haven't figured out quite how they do the syncing with last.fm, but it seems to be working somehow.
[edit: You can turn logging on / off via config. Once turned on rockbox creates a last.fm compatible log file, which you can then transfer to your comp and upload to last.fm via certain freeware software]
So of course now I'm thinking about getting a new mp3 player ... One that's on the list at the top of the rockbox mainpage ...
[edit: Several hours of surfing later, I realise that iRiver is trying their best to lose me as a customer. They stop selling their older players and only offer their latest ones instead. I'd always wanted to support them since they embraced and supported ogg vorbis in their players. Now you can't even buy any new H320s or H340s anymore it seems, you can get those only via eBay. And I don't want to buy a used mp3 player.
So now I'm looking into SanDisk players. I like this one, it's got 8GB of flash memory and decent battery life. It doesn't natively support ogg vorbis, but I wouldn't really use the official firmware version anyway, would I? Then again, on the one hand I don't want to buy a used player, on the other hand the first thing I intend to do with such a new player would void the warranty ... Guess I'll sleep on it.]
[yet another quick edit: last.fm now has event and recommendation rss feeds, and calendars (ICS). I've set up the RSS feed in firefox, but why can't I get the event calendar to work in sunbird? ): ]
As it is now, my last.fm profile only contains tracks that I've listened to while sitting at the PC at home. But just this past weekend, I listened through all of my La Vela Puerca collection three or four times, while at work, using my iRiver and some stereo boxes (by the end of the weekend, the battery on my player was totally dead). None of those maybe 200 tracks shows up in my profile though, which IMO is a pity.
And seriously, how hard could it be? All you'd really need is for the player software to create a log file of songs played. Grab the artist and title tags, length, add current system time, and check whether the song was skipped or fast-forwarded.
Back home you could just copy the log file to your computer, have it changed to the correct syntax for last.fm, and transfer it there in pretty much the same way as the winamp plugin does now (if it fails to connect to last.fm, it stores the data locally anyway until it gets a connection, so no difference there).
Anyway, what are the chances of actually seeing such a thing, for my player in particular? I can't even find a firmware download on their site for my player anymore, they must've stopped development years ago.
I did some googling though, and even though I couldn't find a solution for my particular player, there're actually people out there developing alternative firmware software for popular players: Rockbox. They've already got stable versions for iPods, iRivers, etc. And as far as I can tell, Rockbox does support scrobbling tracks. I haven't figured out quite how they do the syncing with last.fm, but it seems to be working somehow.
[edit: You can turn logging on / off via config. Once turned on rockbox creates a last.fm compatible log file, which you can then transfer to your comp and upload to last.fm via certain freeware software]
So of course now I'm thinking about getting a new mp3 player ... One that's on the list at the top of the rockbox mainpage ...
[edit: Several hours of surfing later, I realise that iRiver is trying their best to lose me as a customer. They stop selling their older players and only offer their latest ones instead. I'd always wanted to support them since they embraced and supported ogg vorbis in their players. Now you can't even buy any new H320s or H340s anymore it seems, you can get those only via eBay. And I don't want to buy a used mp3 player.
So now I'm looking into SanDisk players. I like this one, it's got 8GB of flash memory and decent battery life. It doesn't natively support ogg vorbis, but I wouldn't really use the official firmware version anyway, would I? Then again, on the one hand I don't want to buy a used player, on the other hand the first thing I intend to do with such a new player would void the warranty ... Guess I'll sleep on it.]
[yet another quick edit: last.fm now has event and recommendation rss feeds, and calendars (ICS). I've set up the RSS feed in firefox, but why can't I get the event calendar to work in sunbird? ): ]
