Now I'm back to Linux on the Desktop for my dayjob, I was slightly nervous about checking out the state of the art for Linux music players; an area I've never felt the Linux desktop was very strong on.

However for the time being I've largely side-stepped the issue by listening to BBC 6 Music for most of the day. For better or worse, I scrobble, and somebody has written a neat web app for scrobbling along to radio stations. When I want to listen to something different for a change, I've been trying out a trial of Google Play Music, for which somebody has written a Chrome extension to scrobble. On the rare occasions I listen to local music, I'm using VLC.

Google Play Music seems pretty good, but I'm not getting a lot from my trial because 6 Music is generally fantastic.

Scrobbling 6 Music has revealed a bit of a disconnect for how I use last.fm, and how website thinks you should use it. Within a day or two, my "music compability" with 6 Music was (predictably) "SUPER". Looking at my "Top artists", right near the top are 6 Music's current playlist favourites Courtney Barnett and Nadine Shah, who I can (at least) recall the songs that have been played; just below them are Young Fathers, who I cannot. A little lower are Hot Chip and Slaves: both artists who have current singles out which I enjoyed for a while, but the relentless BBC playlist policy is overdoing them and I'm inclined to switch over when they come on now. If I listen to a whole album in a given week, then the artist will likely (and rightly) be sat at the top of "last 7 days"; if I don't, then it could be something I can't even remember listening to.

Comments

Atom
comment 1
Different people want different things from a music player; as far as I'm concerned, Quod Libet is still the most stable and scalable player with the best tag-editor and library. I'm a bit sad that there's no way to make an ever-refreshing playlist of 'albums I haven't listened to recently', but the Random Album Playback plugin with in weighted mode is a workable approximation.
Comment by Screwtape,
comment 2

With less than 10K plays, it's no wonder your "top artists" aren't that important to you... yet.

Of course, "Showing: Last 7 Days" for your top 6 doesn't really help :-) Even with quite a lot more scrobbles than you (>100K), I still think that the "all the time" stats is what ends up giving the better view of what I like to listen, but at this point is already quite interesting to look at the yearly and even the 6 month stats. 3 months... its already a bit too random, at times.

I wrote a blog post looking at my own stats when I reached 100K plays, maybe you'll find it interesting: http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.pt/2012/01/100000-tracks-played-on-lastfm.html

Comment by Marcos Marado,

✏ comment on this page (Help on commenting) ⏳