last.fm tracks inserted into playlist

[Casey Link]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at kde.org> wrote:
> On 13 Nov 2008, at 12:32, Peter Saffrey wrote:
>
>> I listen to Amarok using the Random Mix dynamic playlist. I like the
>> fact it shows me what tracks are coming up - I can remove ones I don't
>> feel like hearing, or dump in whole albums to listen to with random
>> resuming after that.
>>
>> I would like to augment this behaviour by including a track
>> recommended
>> by last.fm (not from my collection), say, once every 10 songs. Can I
>> do
>> this with Amarok? How?
>
> You cannot do this. If it is not in your collection, how can you play
> it? Last.fm does not provide links to play individual songs, indeed,
> this would make no sense from a licensing point of view.
>
>> Amarok seems to implement last.fm as a single virtual track, that just
>> plays without moving on. I prefer the method used by Banshee, where it
>> puts a few recommended tracks into the playlist where I can see what
>> they are.
>
> I don't know how banshee works, never having used it and being unable
> to try it on OS X.
>
> Amarok does not implement *all* of last.fm as a virtual track. It
> implements each last.fm *stream* as a virtual track. There is no other
> coherent way of doing it: last.fm only provides streams, even though
> it uses a metaphor of tracks. It is only possible to fetch 5 tracks at
> a time to play from a stream, and they are only valid until the next 5
> are fetched. So it doesn't make any sense to implement it in any other
> way.
Technically it is possible to play one last.fm track.. since we get
them in batches of 5, we would just stop after 1. The  problem is you
can't select a particular track.. you have no control over the track's
last.fm gives you.

Like Leo said, it wouldn't make sense from a licensing standpoint to
enable this sort of feature. Whatever Banshee does is either against
last.fm's TOS, or it isn't doing what you think it is.

Casey