Wow - that was my impression I had when I first time opened Last.fm for Nokia N9. The application is developed by Matias Perez, a big talent of the N9 and Maemo community. Within just one day he built up a very usable application and now, a few days later, we are already at version 0.0.4. Of course we still have a very early version in front of us, but I'm surprised how mature this Last.fm client already is.
The amazing thing is: You can try out this application on your N9.
What is Last.fm?
Last.fm (founded by 4 Austrians/Germans in 2002) is an internet radio based on social software, which was developed to recommend new songs and artist to match the music taste of its listeners. Many record labels and artists are encouraged by Last.fm to place their licenses at disposal, which made it possible to have a catalog of over 80 million songs (to buy), 7 millions used for internet radio streaming and over 150'000 as free downloads.
Registered users can access Last.fm over their website or through various applications for different platforms. If the user listens to a song on a Last.fm, title and artists are saved in the user profile and evaluated statistically, among other things to suggest new songs. Last.fm calls this procedure "scrobbling".
Even though last.fm is mainly financed through advertisement, they made the doubtful decision in 2009 to let users outside Germany, UK and US pay about €3 ($4) per month to listen to unlimited songs. The website says, 50 songs is the limit without paying. However, the N9 application let me already listen to more than 50 songs and I don't live in one of the mentioned countries. But if someone loves the service - those €3 totally worth it.
Anyways, Last.fm is a fantastic way to listen to internet radio where you can choose a genre you like, a type of music/artists or let the application create an individual mix for you.
Last.fm for N9 by Matias Perez
Before you can use Perez' application, you need a valid Last.fm account. If you are new to it, sign up on the official website. With an account, the downloaded and installed application (file can be found at the end of article) you are ready to go!
Open the application and enter you username and password. Now you have following options:
- Search for artists: Enter a favorite artist and listen to her/his song and similar ones.
- Search for genre: Listen to music out of a favorite genre.
- Library radio: Listen to songs you know.
- Mix radio: Listen to songs you know, mixed up with new songs you might like.
- Recommended radio: Recommended songs matching your music preferences.
- Neighbours radio: Songs listened by people who have a similar music taste.
- Scrobble all songs on/off: Save all heard songs to your preference profile automatically or not.
Once you are listening to a song, you can press the info button to get further information about the artist. The heart button adds a song to your favorites, the other two are to dislike a song and to "scrobble" it. You always can skip a song, but not go backwards. The interface works very similar to the N9 application "Soundtracker Radio".
After having listened to several songs, I must say the song selection was really good and I only skipped few of them.
Updates
To update Last.fm, download latest release and installed it over previous version.
Updates
To update Last.fm, download latest release and installed it over previous version.
- version 0.0.5: Adds swipe to skip songs, mini bio panel and improved auto-scrobbler (song is added after 50% of playtime instead of 30 seconds.
I like to remember you again, that this application isn't finished, might have missing features and is not officially published yet. Please let us know with a comment if you find any bugs or have ideas for improvements and additional features - they will be forwarded to the developer.
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| Feels and looks like an official application. I'm amazed of what has been created here. |
Follow the discussion on talk.maemo.org
In case you don't know how to install the downloaded file, please read following article: How to install third party applications.
In case you don't know how to install the downloaded file, please read following article: How to install third party applications.
! If you like Last.fm or any other creation of Matias Perez - why not say thank you with a donation?
