Amarok article: last.fm - when do I need a profile, how is last.fm used for dynamic playlists?

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Greg!

Thanks a lot for your answer. It cleared up things quite a lot for me. 
Also thanks for the other answer. Thanks to everyone else for any 
answer - it will help a lot with writing my article.

Am Freitag 14 September 2007 schrieb Greg Meyer:

[...]
> > 1) Send played tracks and update the profile this way
> >
> > 2) Get similar artists
>
> Yes, there are two services.  One you need a profile for submitting
> played tracks to keep track of your listening, and you don't need a
> profile to retrieve suggested songs.
>
> > Both are grayed out immediately when I delete my last.fm username
> > from the settings. Now I did not yet quite crasp the difference
> > between the display of similar tracks in the context browser and the
> > service 2 "Get similar artists". I thought both mean the same.
> > Graying out service 2 seems inconsistent to me, since also the german
> > documentation tells me that I do not need a last.fm profile in order
> > to use that service.
>
> You have found a bug.  I fyou clear your username and then close and
> re-enter the configuration dialog, you will see the checkboxes are no
> longer greyed out.

I will report this one.

> > Dynamic playlists already worked very well before I created a
> > last.fm profile today, so either it doesn't need last.fm or it uses
> > it without needing a profile. How is that stuff working? I still
> > think its using last.fm, but does not need a profile.
>
> You don't need to retireve similar artists to use dynamic playlists. 
> Dynamic playlists can be "fed" by many differnet things.  Examples:
>
> - A large static playlist that you want to play randomly.
> - A smart playlist that slects only the songs you haven't heard in six
> months, or only the songs with scores greater than 90, or of genre =
> "rock", or labels that match, etc.
> - You can use the default dynamic playlist called suggested songs that
> is fed from the last.fm web service
>
> I guess dynamic playlists aren't really playlists, but a mode.  You
> have to feed the mode with tracks from some source.

Thanks. That cleared up quite some of my confusion. Well then Amarok was 
not using lastfm at all for my dynamic playlists all the time, cause I 
just use a dynamic playlists that gets its results from all tracks in my 
collection. And I thought Amarok was using it cause I was amazed by the 
good results of the choices it made most of the time.

Is it possible to manually configure a playlist to use lastfm instead of 
using the preconfigured "Suggested Songs" one? Or is it even possible to 
compose a dynamic playlist taking an intelligent playlist as source + 
using lastfm on that then?

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok/attachments/20070916/929f9f5e/attachment.sig>