New Last.fm protocol

[Max Howell]

> Perhaps we could also think about integrating the last.fm
> fingerprinter if that is allowed.

The source is out there, so feel free. Already we have services that  
give the "correct" metadata for the fingerprint.
The result of a fingerprint is a uniqueid (which we assign  
ascendingly), which I think is 64bits, which may also be useful to  
you. The fingerprint itself its about 70kB.
The requirements for the Fingerprinting stuff are a little annoying,  
especially for packaging on mac/windows, libsamplerate, libmad and  
taglib (at least this last one is easy for you :)

The benefits of fingerprinting for the user are almost 100% correct  
scrobbles, and the facility to correct tags. I can't comment on the  
similarity of MusicBrainz's service. So you may want to wait and see  
how ours turns out before you jump on board.

>> After some hunting here are the resources Max is referring to.
>>
>> The 1.4 Beta: http://cdn.last.fm/client/src/last.fm-1.4.0.53395.src.tar.bz2
>> Where updates are posted:
>> http://www.last.fm/group/Audioscrobbler+Beta/forum/30705/_/348752
>>
>> He doesn't mention this, but we should recognize MBIDs and scrobble
>> them. See this bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122281

The offiicial client still doesn't do this, so I wouldn't jump through  
hoops for it.

The new scrobbling arch does have the now-playing notification bonus.  
Also the code I've written in the client is pretty robust now, with a  
real emphasis on never losing scrobbles. But it still requires a bit  
of understanding before you can just drop it in.

We'd be very much interested to see the Amarok approach to the Radio  
problem, as ours, frankly, could be improved on.

The webservice architecture we have should be quite easy to use, but I  
understand you have your own, so you may want to port the requests (eg  
Tagging), the sources should be easy to understand.

Max

ps I apologise for not being on freenode for weeks. We now have a CBS  
mothership firewall, and apparently freenode is evil. Can you say  
lame? I'm always on irc.audioscrobbler.net #audioscrobbler