I had an idea to look at how audioscrobbler works on last.fm1 as I want to do a bit more with and get a bit more from the music data I'm sending around. For the uninitiated the music players I use at home and on the phone send details of the tracks I listen to up to last.fm1 and they then make charts like this2 out of it. They call this "scrobbling" for some reason. When I first used last.fm it was just called audioscrobbler, which then became (or merged with) last.fm1.
I just checked out libre.fm3 because it appeared as an option on xbmc, it's a more open version of the same thing. They way they recommend setting up your existing player to use them instead is to change your hosts file so that any requests that would have gone to last.fm go to libre.fm instead. This triggered the idea that I can change my hosts file to point to my own server, catch the request, do something with the data, then send it on again to where it was meant to be. Not tried this yet but it seems sound. Now for the next bit...
I want to send some extra data when I "scrobble" a track, I want to send all my tagging data for the band for starters. Then I can make a pie chart saying "this week I listened to 67% heavy metal and 33% indie" and exciting stuff like that. I just need to find some spare space in the request to do this. If I can make this work maybe I'll submit the idea to the last.fm / libre.fm guys too. Or maybe someone already has?
Next stop after that is location data - I like the idea of logging that I mostly listen to this sort of music in this location. Then if it caught on we could have weather type maps saying "there's an indie front coming in from the north". Some people have tried this already, there's an iphone app that will do it but I'm not sure if there is anything else.
Time now for lunch and then WALKING. What sort of music will I be listening to on my stroll to Lympne and back? If only there was some way to see..?
Yeah I've dumped the "make the subject a song lyric" idea again, though this time I'm actually thinking about music... I may revisit this later.
UPDATE: I revisited this later, and updated this for xbmc.
xbmc: X-box Media Centre, some code that would run on an old xbox or other computer hardware to play movies and music etc. I used to talk about this a lot...
Paul Clarke's blog - I live in Hythe in the far South. Wed and father to 2, I am a full stack web engineer, and I do mostly js / Node, some ruby, other languages etc. I like pubbing, parkrun, restaurants, home automation and other diy stuff, history, tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, + time travel.