Last.FM Updates Desktop Web Radio Client
Late yesterday, London, UK time, Last.FM announced the PUBLIC BETA for the latest version (Mac, Windows, Linux) of their FREE web radio client that integrates the audioscrobbler technology. This release brings a slew of major changes to the software include, but not limited to:
- Integrated fingerprinting, rather than the standalone client as before.
- Import media libraries from Winamp and WMP for Windows.
- MSN Messenger Now Playing notifications for Windows.
- Diagnostics dialog with better error reporting.
- Better tag dialog for tagging and sharing your music taste.
- Better iPod Scrobbling Support announced as being delayed for another release.
- Support for Mac OS X Leopard.
What is Last.FM?
For those of you who don't know, Last.FM is a social networking site for music buffs that includes the ability to track your listening habits, understand your taste and serve you up music recommendations, and is essentially the best way to share, listen and discover new artists and bands online. It's a FREE service and differentiates itself from services such as iLike and Pandora by it's use of the audioscrobbler technology that tracks your listening habits to an online profile which can then be used to recommend artists, bands, gigs, and merchandise.
Where Next?
With this the software takes a step closer to regaining its rightful position as the player of choice for last.fm radio listeners. In the year since their web-based flash player and widgets were released on the last.fm web site numbers of listeners through the flash radio and widget players have been steadily climbing, to the detriment of the desktop player.
This release includes some other minor changes and bug fixes to the software that include:
- Switched to libmad for MP3 playback, fixing the intermittent white noise bug.
- Fix for noisy playback at start of radio tracks on Linux.
- Proxy autodetection on all platforms.
- Option to disable iPod support (i.e. LastFMHelper) added.
- Option to disable systray/menu bar icon.
- Mini avatars of friends and neighbours in sidebar.
- Fixed Remove From Profile in Recently Player.
- Fixed loving/banning/tagging of tracks with & in them from sidebar.
- Fixed language detection on Mac.
- Added more actions to systray menu.
- Old cache items automatically cleared.
- Localisation fixes.
The desktop application, though in some ways being superseded by the available web options, remains useful and has in the past been used by the BBC and other online radio stations to track the music that is being played on their shows. The desktop application also provies access to information such as personal tags, friends and fellower listeners and more, where the flash radio client cannot.
Conclusion: Get Downloading
On initial install and update on my Tiger-based Mac Book Pro, there were no problems other than anything that couldnt be fixed by clearing the cache of 5000 files. That being done the software has been running smoothly for me, but as they say: "Please bear in mind, as always, that this is a BETA version and is therefore likely to crash and behave in an unstable manner until we've ironed out the issues. So run at your own risk!
Visit the last.fm web site to find out more about the service, read the BETA forum posting to find out more about this PUBLIC BETA release, and use the links below to download
NOTE: To install the Mac beta, please remove the old version first.