What’s Last.fm?

Basically you install some client software which tracks (the verb they use is ‘scrobbles’) get played in your audio player of choice and uploads that data to a Last.fm server.

Why would you do that?

For one, it’s interesting to see what you actually listen to, not just what you think you listen to:

My Last.fm profile with Recently Listened Tracks

(You can see I’ve been catching up on my NPR Live Concert Podcasts this weekend while writing some blog posts).

In addition to your own constantly updated, live list of what you’re listening to, you can also track friends and what Last.fm calls “neighbours” (UK spelling showing you where last.fm hails from) – people who you may or may not know but who have musical tastes similar to yours.

Two of my last.fm neighbours, and our shared artists

You can also listen to streaming music from last.fm – a radio station created based on your own library (tracks you’ve scrobbled) or your neighborhood. There’s even a streaming iPhone application.

Why do we need Libre.fm?

In exchange for all this functionality, however, I’m essentially giving last.fm (and parent company CBS, and all the third parties specified in their terms of service) access to a substantial bit of data about my habits.

Who owns that data, both legally and in practical terms? What happens if I want to take all that data – my complete listening history of the last two years – and migrate to another service? What if the terms of service at last.fm change, and they decide to impose a fee on all users just to maintain profiles? Would my choice essentially be to take it or leave it? What if last.fm imploded – see ma.gnolia – and lost all that data?

(Technically I propogate the last.fm ‘recently played tracks’ stream as part of an aggregated lifestream at johneckman.com, so I keep my own copy of the data as well – but most last.fm users do not).

Users looking to run their own “track what I play, let me display it to friends and see theirs” service now have an alternative: Libre.fm, current in alpha release:

Libre.fm

You could say Libre.fm is to Last.fm as Identi.ca is to Twitter.

Like the code behind Identi.ca, the code running Libre.fm is licensed using the AGPL, and the content is explicitly licensed (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike) for sharing. In addition to getting the code which runs the service, users can also retrieve data dumps of their own tracks and those of their friends.

Also like Identi.ca, the folks at Libre.fm are leveraging existing clients and APIs. identi.ca replicated Twitter’s API, enabling clients which had been built for Twitter to be easily adapted to point to Identi.ca instead, and even created a “bridge” function enabling users to autofeed microblog status updates to Twitter from Identi.ca. The Libre.fm wiki points to several clients which can “multiscrobble” (point to more than one scrobbling server) as well as clients which can be made to scrobble to turtle.libre.fm by use of a hosts file redirecting the last.fm scrobbler server address.

The intial site is in alpha – you can request an invitation to become a user or you can explore popular artists in the current users’ playlists. (I’m jeckman there as on last.fm)

See also: Libre.fm – Building an Open Last.fm

I first started using Rockbox Rockbox years ago because I had an Archos Jukebox Recorder, which was an early, 2.5″ hard-drive based MP3 player/recorder, which was only hampered by its anemic software.

When I later migrated to an iPod Nano, I loved the hardware but was not happy with the Apple software. Having used the Archos, I was used to just being able to drag audio files on and off the device, mounting it via USB as an external drive, with a normal file system. This meant I could synch the files I was listening to between my home PC running Linux, my work PC running Windows (their choice, not mine), or (later) my Mac OS X laptop, all without having to worry about DRM.

Rockbox still operates in this same core fashion, though over the years it has improved in a few key respects:

• Voice navigation: Rockbox can use audio clips to “voice” the navigation options. It’s not quite voice driven in the sense of hearing your voice and reacting, but it enables you to navigate easily without being able to see the screen. Handy for the visually impaired as well as for hands-free operation, as when driving.
• Tag database: Although Rockbox allows you to navigate through the directories on the device to find the music you’re looking for, it can also auto-generate a database of tags from the audio files, letting you navigate by artist / genre / album regardless of how the files are organized on the file system.
• Themes, Fonts, Plugins: Rockbox is fully themable and supports a robust plugin architecture, giving you more control over not just the look and feel but also the functionality of the player. There are even the expected games (yes, you can run Doom on your iPod).
• Other formats: This is the biggest change in 3.0. Previous versions of Rockbox used hardware on the device to decode mp3, which meant they were limited to the MP3 format. Other formats, like Ogg Vorbis, MP2, AAC, WAV, FLAC – had to be converted to MP3 to be played on a Rockbox player. (See the list of codecs in the Rockbox wiki for more details on specific formats).

The only real limitation of Rockbox (or feature, depending on how you feel about DRM) is that it can’t play DRM encoded files. If you don’t buy DRM encoded files, that isn’t so much a problem. ;)

Rockbox also offers a utility (in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions) for installation, and can be installed without disturbing the existing iPod firmware – so you can go back to vanilla if you need to.

Check out version 3.0 for various models and give it a try.

The panelists were:

• Bob Bickel, from Ringside Networks
• John Newton, from Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, from Acquia

Although the conference doesn’t audio tape or videotape the breakout sessions in the smaller rooms – only the keynote – they were nice enough to allow us to record the panel’s audio.

You can download the MP3 (43MB, 128 bit rate) or listen in the player below:

The panel was covered a few places:

• On Jeff’s blog: “Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Drupal Perspective“
• By Kathleen Reidy on the 451 Group blog: “Open source at Enterprise 2.0“
• By Dennis Byron at ebizQ: “Open source, including open source Sharepoint tool, in/at Enterprise 2.0“

Let me know if I missed any.