I’ve been a last.fm user for quite some time now. I’ve actually been using the service since it was called Audioscrobbler mainly to track my music listening habits. I’m a dork, I like numbers and stats. Gimmie a break.
Recently, the service was relaunched with a few new features one of which is a Flash-based player. From what I remember, the player has been a part of last.fm for most of it’s existance, but it was always a download. I gave it a shot and it wasn’t work too well in Linux (probably because Linux only has Flash 7 when Windows has Flash 9).
I was surprised to find that Ubuntu’s repositories contains the last.fm player package. I installed it just to check it out and it’s been fairly good so far.
I fired up the “metalcore” tag station because I figured that would contain a lot of the music I like. It has been pretty close to what I would actually listen to. I wonder if it looks at my listening stats and makes selections based on that. It hasn’t been foolproof though. There’s quite a few bands I’ve heard that I would not consider metalcore at all and in one instance Britany Spears came up.
There’s also a few other flaws I’ve been dealing with. There is no volume leveling, so you end up listening to a really quiet song and turning the volume up only to have your speakers blasting when the next track starts. There’s also been quite a bit of skipping. It’s most noticable right away when the song starts (presumably when it’s doing most of the downloading). My experience would probably fair better on my home Internet connection as it is 3-4 times as fast as the connection at work.
After trying the last.fm player, I can say I’d recommend it. At the very least, it gives me a little hope for not having to sit through an entire work day in silence if I happen to forget my iPod. It doesn’t limit the amount of songs you can skip like Pandora
