What is Last.fm?
“Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler system, a music engine based on a massive collection of Music Profiles. Each music profile belongs to one person, and describes their taste in music. Last.fm uses these music profiles to make personalized recommendations, match you up with people who like similar music, and generate custom radio stations for each person.” - last.fm website

What is it?
This small application enables you to retrieve various informations upon a Last.fm user. It uses the XML data available directly from Audioscrobbler. I orignally began to write it because i wanted to try out WinBinder, which makes it possible to write windows applications in PHP. It is written entirely in PHP!! Some socket-magic and a XML library. Easy stuff :).

First thing i tried was fetching and displaying RSS Feeds. I listened to Last.FM that time and thus it was obvious to use the recent tracks feed. It worked right away and i began to work and work more on that base and included a lot of stuff.

Screenshots

This is the mainwindow of my application. To get started you need to enter a username at the top right corner. When you click “Change User” it will get the last 10 played tracks and profiledata. If you want more info just hit one of the buttons at the bottom right, like “Neighbours” or “User Top Tracks” and so on. If will fill the other lists here or pop up other windows with even more stuff (see below). In the Recent Tracks list you can select one and then click Artist Info. This button will fetch infos upon the artist if avaiable.

The Artistinfo takes long to load tho, but contains mostly everything of interest. The main reason why i wrote this was that i mostly don’t have the time to look up for similar artist when i just listened a cool tune. I mostly listen to music when i am working and visiting some website just distracts me. You can double-click on a similar artist and it will open a browser window with the last.fm artist page. Great to find new music.

You can check out a users neighbourhood by clicking on the button. It will list all neighbours and display avatar if avaible. Note that users only have a neighbourhood once listened to more then 300 tracks. Neighbours are people with a similar taste in music. The value “Taste match” indicates how close the neighbours taste is compared to the actual user.

If the user has made some friendships you can browse them here. Most interesting is the connection he made. Like in all other windows you can visit them directly from there. Pretty cool to find new people on last.fm. It was planned that you can switch users from there too, but i think that’s pretty useless since the style would stay the same. However.. feature suggestions are welcome.

Every user can run his own journal. Most users talk here about artist, music in general, tracks and various other stuff. In my application you can read the most recent RSS entrys directly in the window. Just select an entry if available and click “Read”.

Well.. thats it. On the mainwindow you can click “Update” every now and then if the user is actually listening you can update the recent tracks list that way.

Download

Current Version: 0.7b
Prior Version: internal beta

DOWNLOAD
System: WinXP (other Windows might work too)
Filesize: 2,05MB

Donate

I went from Subscriber to User yesterday because i haven’t sent some money to paypal yet. It would be nice if you donate a euro or two so i can afford another month of last.fm subscription. Thanks and enjoy the application!

Sourcecode:

Erm.. i always add CC GNU-GPL, cause i am usually releasing PHP Scripts. My fault. Actually it is not GPL Open Source and so i removed the license note for now. I will release it on GPL when i am done developing. No use to give out source from a unfinished product.