Last.FM Integration (!)

[martijn86]

There's a lot of chatter about the last.fm plug-in on Winamp.. which for me.. works. I don't scrobble my tracks as much as I should but listen to a lot of similar artist radio and tag radio.

I'm just really REALLY disappointed about the plug-in + app. It's just stupid that there has to be a different app and a plug-in to connect the both. Winamp has all the desired room to integrate last.fm.

I'm talking about:
- replacing Winamps ugly Now Playing with Last.fm's now playing.
- Having a quick look in similar artist while playing.
- Looking at your account and those of friends.
- Playing similar artist/tag radio within Winamp.
- Browsing artist in Winamps web browser and playing the song's within Winamp.
- Getting missing album art from Last.fm. (!)

It will be more user friendly, CPU friendly and just the logical way to get the best out of both.


2 quick photoshops.

[Sawg]

Unless Time Warner decided to buy Last.fm I wouldn't expect it. Ask last.fm to make a Winamp plugin that doesn't suck if you want integration.

[martijn86]

What is it with American companies always having to buy each other or else be competitors and thus very distant. What's wrong with working together from both sides making a product as it should be?

It's just childish to say you won't make the best out of your app because you haven't bought the other company. Have some guts, take the lead, simply pick up the phone in person and say:"Hey, let's make this colab look good together!"

[jbond23]

Originally posted by Sawg
Unless Time Warner decided to buy Last.fm I wouldn't expect it. Ask last.fm to make a Winamp plugin that doesn't suck if you want integration.

Hmmm. Look at the linux world and every music player includes last.fm integration. Because that's what the users actually want.

Sadly in the Windows world the market is dominated by a few commercial companies who can't bring themselves to build what people want but only what brings or at least doesn't cost them money. I appreciate that you're just stating commercial facst, but it still sucks.

One possible way out of this is what the original poster is suggesting. A 3rd party plug in. I can't see any obvious reason why this should be impossible but it's going to take some effort from a competent programmer who understands winamp and can learn about the last.fm streaming protocol. The protocol is not that complicated. It's been done for foobar2000; it ought to be possible for winamp.

Of course, we could point at last.fm and ask why they don't do it. But from their point of view winamp is just one of many systems. And its not even the market leader any more.

[DrO]

the real problem lies in that there's little interest from people who can code and who do so for winamp to do such things. also a lot of people will only generally code something that interests them, not coding just for the sake of doing it (which has bitten me in the arse too many times). and the other thing is that most people requesting things just aren't able to code it themselves which leaves things in a deadlock.

-daz

[jbond23]

Which brings us to the view of Winamp as the centre of an ecology of plugin applications. This is a common pattern now. You've only got to look at things like Firefox and Twitter to see how successful it can be. As you say, there is a deadlock where the people with the need or idea don't have the coding skills to do anything about it. But at the same time, writing winamp plugins is relatively hard and it feels like there's a dwindling number of people prepared to take it on.

Long term (Winamp 6?) perhaps AOL need to put effort into making plugin development easier to ensure the long term survival of the program.

But in the short term we're back with the same issue. There are people who desperately want to listen to last.fm streams (and XSPF streams) inside Winamp. Right now there's no solution to this as there's not even a stable proxy to act as a go between since Last.fm disabled their plain shoutcast stream. And the official way of using the last.fm client to provide a stream is clunky and contains no meta data. I don't really mind what solution we find even if it's completely outside Winamp. I just want a solution

[jbond23]

So. Last.FM changed their streaming rules and in theory 3rd party players need an API key and can only stream to subscribers. And even with the official last.fm client streams are free for US, UK and Germany but subscriber only for everyone else.

Except that Amarok, Songbird, Foobar have all solved this and have last.fm streaming support baked in. Which leaves us with 2 options for winamp.
- Use the official player and "stream to external player". This is flaky to start up. and the stream contains no metadata. So although it's playing in winamp, you can't see what's playing.
- Use LastFMProxy. This is currently broken but there's a patch on the last.fm lastfmproxy discussion group.

In some ways Orgle is really disappointing. It's going to take quite a while for it to be as good as last.fm if it ever does. But because it's a competitor, it makes it even less likely that there will be a official last.fm support in winamp. So we're back to needing a 3rd party plugin. Which means finding a programmer who knows the winamp plugin API and has the smarts and desire to build it.