last.fm as a service?

[Shane King]

Seb Ruiz wrote:
> Actually I think it makes perfect sense to make last.fm a service.
> I'll tell you why. There is much more to last.fm than just the radio
> stations, eg:
>  - friends
>  - neighbourhoods
>  - recommended music
>  - fingerprinting
>  - wiki stuff
>  - tagging
>  - love/ban
>  - "my playlist"
>  - charts
> 
> I thought we could incorporate something similar to the official
> client last.fm "profile bar" [1] as a service pane. I reckon it would
> be totally cool. It would have it's own configuration page with the
> services and be able to provide us with much more functionality than
> we can currently put anywhere. It would also clean up our menus for
> those people that don't use last.fm.

Agreed with that, I think there's heaps of stuff we could be doing with 
last.fm if the infrastructure is put in place to do it. The good thing 
about making it a service is that you can easily turn it all off if 
you're not interested.

Ian Monroe wrote:
 > Scrobbling is something that happens only when playing local files or
 > last.fm streams. This isn't something the Service framework provides
 > for I don't think.

I agree some things don't necessarily fit cleanly into the service idea 
yet (eg scrobbling is a special case tin that it operates on local files 
as well, which probably nothing else does atm). I think it makes some 
sense to treat the services as more generic plugins though that can 
provide things like that. There's no real reason why other services 
can't do something useful with your local file plays, like maybe an 
independent music store service offering suggestions: "If you like big 
name artist X, you might like our indie artist Y".

Maybe the service framework should be extended to allow for things like 
scrobbling, which I do see as a generically useful ability (even if 
last.fm is the only thing to make use of it right now).

 > LastFm streams should really be just another radio stream type in the
 > playlist browser, like it is currently in 1.4. Like you can add a
 > radio station with a URL or you can add a LastFm stream with a
 > lastfm:// URL or with a dialog to help you construct a lastfm:// URL.
 > They would be implemented as subclasses of Meta::Track.

But you can also play single files or albums "on demand" (the ones with 
the yellow play buttons on the site). Surely a way to search for those 
types of streams is useful.

Shane.