It is the silliness of the names that catch me.

Scrobbling: (Audioscrobbler and Last.fm fused together to form one service) A Last.fm user can build up a musical profile using two methods: by listening to their personal music collection on a music player application with an Audioscrobbler plugin, or by listening to the Last.fm internet radio service, usually with the Last.fm client. The songs played are added to a log from which personal top artists and top tracks, bar charts and musical recommendations are calculated.

The user’s page also displays Recently Played tracks, made available via web services, so you can display them on blogs or as forum signatures or “quilts”.

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and also added to your music profile. Scrobbling allows one to rapidly fill a user’s last.fm profile. It will send the name of songs you play in the media player of choice (e.g. iTunes, Winamp, etc) to Last.fm.

One advantage to scrobbling is you can what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see in a type of limited social networking.

The “Scrobbled” songs also create the data set that assists Last.fm on organizing and recommending music to other users and to create personalized radio stations, among other uses. These recommendations are picked using a collaborative filtering algorithm. Neat way to find NEW but related musical tastes.

Open Source (GPL)

The Last.fm software is Open Source (GPL)

Programmers can download the source code to the latest client version from last.fm’s Subversion repository here:
svn://svn.audioscrobbler.net/client

Plugin Developers

The Win32 ScrobSub library can be found here:
svn://svn.audioscrobbler.net/ScrobSub

Notes on Subversion

Subversion Project Location: Tigris.org Server

Goal: The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. The software is released under an Apache/BSD-style open source license.

Packages: Subversion packages for various Operating Systems. You can compile its source code release directly, or you can install one of the prepackaged binaries for your own operating system. The Subversion project does not officially endorse or maintain any binary packages of the Subversion software.

Release status: Unless the source is noted as “alpha”, “beta”, or “rc” in its name, it is tested and considered stable for production use.

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