Wednesday, June 28. 2006Hooray, last.fm stream support in Amarok!
I'm very happy to break this news to you, as I think it's an incredibly cool feature: Amarok now has full support for last.fm streams. This includes advanced features known from the last.fm player, like skip/love/ban, cover images and metadata. Have a look:
 In true Amarok fashion, we have developed this feature with intense teamwork. The planning and first code was started at our K3M multimedia meeting. Seb Ruiz did the initial port of Muesli's original last.fm player code (Qt4) to Amarok. Then Ian Monroe improved the framework and added a proxy server, which was needed to make our engines understand the lastfm:// protocol. Soon we realized that an in-process server would not work; here my previous experience with server programming and Ruby kicked in: I ported the proxy to a tiny external Ruby script, with very low overhead. Now we were able to listen to a last.fm stream with Amarok for the first time, which rocked. Soon we noticed that the server script was bit too simplistic; it would not work with the Helix engine. To the rescue came our Helix expert Paul Cifarelli, who had never before programmed in Ruby. In a matter of hours he managed to improve the script, so that it now works with all engines. Then we added support for cover images from last.fm - they are shown automatically for each track the stream is playing. And our graphics artist Vadim Petrunin made some funky icons for the skip/love/ban buttons. Sounds complicated? It was  But it was a damn good hack, and we've enjoyed it immensely. You guys can lean back and enjoy your favourite music from last.fm in Amarok 1.4.1.Have fun  Trackbacks
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Ah! great.
could you guys also add an easy & obvious way to bookmark radio streams? Even in beta1 of Amarok 1.4.1, I can't find an easy way to do so. If you guys could add a button or something to "bookmark current stream" that would be great! Thanks!
Awesome!
Spreading the word... http://www.last.fm/user/stokedfish/journal/2006/06/28/167222/
great, now I just need to figure out why 1.4 adds my podcasts as a playlist instead of in the podcast section like the 1.3x releases did...
Probably because we support XSPF xml playlists now. Go to the playlist browser and select Add->Podcast....
Just trying svn amarok out, it's awesome. It's also great to see that you switched back to the left vertical context bar. I really like, how it's now in contrast to the 1.4.1 beta, which just looked confusing on my 1680x1050 resolution.
small bugs: the love,skip,ban buttons have a small highlight-zone which doesn't fit the icon-size. furthermore in the playlist window, once you don't listen to the last.fm stream it still shows the meta-data of the last song, you were listening to, so that it seems to be a regular song. it should definitly turn to something like neighbours radio last.fm stream in the playlist window, once it's not playing. a great feature would be a "last.fm next-mode", so that using the next-song amarok binding wouldn't advance in the playlist, but just skipping to the next streamed song. that would be great, because you could use all the dcop-bindings (i.e. foxtunes etc.) Just make a checkbox in the context-window of the last.fm stream. this special next-behaviour is only used, aslong the last.fm radio is playing. You might add these radio-stations to the radio streams once the user enters some valid last.fm user data. Any chance to get a ripping feature for putting the streamed mp3s to the collection? As far as I can see, there isn't a eula problem and aslong it's for someone's home use, it should be fair use?
Your right, its not really clear what should happen when the user clicks next and the last.fm is running.
About skip/love/ban buttons: It's true, they have bad usability. E.g. you get no visible feedback from the button after clicking. Need's some thinking.
About "last.fm mode": Hell no, not another mode. Changing the meaning of the user interface in relation to a mode is a very bad idea. We've already tried hard to get rid of modes as far as we could. Instead, we should introduce some new DCOP calls, like lastfmSkip(), lastfmLove(), and lastfmBan().
Yes. Definately need DCOP calls. I'd like to be able to control last.fm skip/love/ban from kdelirc and via SSH.
Is there any way you could add the discovery mode option (which is for last.fm subscribers) ?
I'm a subscriber and I've not yet discovered the discovery mode
What is it?But generally, we can support pretty much any last.fm stream directly from the Amarok GUI.
Well, in the official player, if you go to the options popup menu you have the checkbox Discovery Mode. When checked the player will only play music that you havn't played before, ie tracks that are not in your profile. It doesn't always work too well, cause of songs appearing in multiple albums I think.
Yeah I'm sure we can add this rather easily. Just that we are now in a string freeze for 1.4.1, so it might have to wait until 1.4.2.
Great
Thanks
Are there any thoughts about adding more last.fm stuff? Like charts, journals (turn the wiki tab into an info tab with different options, e.g. "search wikipedia for this artist", "search last.fm journals for this song" and stuff like that) and tags? You might become the officially recommended last.fm player or something...
I very often just want to find out the most popular songs of an artist. To do so I open last.fm, I enter the artist and search my collection for the song.
Is it possible to set the mode to play only the top 3 or 5 songs of an artist? Or even better would be to see the song popularity in amarok directly
The radio license means last.fm can't tell you what its going to play next.
It's true that Sandstorm and Daft Punk songs are available everywhere via last.fm ??
Men, I already knew amaroK (sorry.. Amarok) was the best player ever, but know I'm really impressed. No words. Great job people!
Argh, I must be the only one who can't use this feature. I have the latest SVN and when I try to insert a last.fm radio stream I get this:
Error Loading Media No suitable input plugin. lastfm://globaltags/metal Is there some other way that I am not seeing?
Make sure you have Ruby installed, are using the latest SVN version of Amarok or the still-unreleased 1.4.1 (coming this weekend) and are using the Helix or Xine engine.
I think thats a gentoo bug with 20060328 series, you need to update to 1.1.2-20060606 to get the fix.
i trying play last.fm radio with svn version of amarok, but i get this errors:
------------------------------------------------------- Error Loading Media No suitable input plugin. http://localhost:40725/theBeard.mp3 Denied access to URL: xine parameters: http://localhost:40725/theBeard.mp3 --------------------------------------------------------------- The port is random but always theBeard.mp3 song with all last.fm radios (neighbours or global) than i try. Any idea? Sorry my bad english.
I get the same thing... amarok_proxy.rb works from the CLI, I think xine is the one to blame...
I've seen ur comment in bugs.kde.org, with last revision of svn the filesong is lastfm.mp3 but the same error occurs.
I get a diferent log of urs: http://pastebin.ca/74254 My log: http://pastebin.ca/75868 I don't know if open a new bug report, at moment append a comment in: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=111983 I'm newbie sending bugs. Sorry for my bad english.
Holly shit! I love u guys... Cant wait to check it out soon. Actaully just checked the main Web site and u guys released the final version today.
How about using last.fm streams to display the cover art for albums that i have and i am listening to, but not streaming?
or, how about having the option to save the cover art that i download to each album's subfolder? i hate getting these album covers and then having database issues and rescanning my collections (or starting with a new install of a different distro) and i end up losing my carefully-selected covers, which were stored with amarok info and not with album files.
About your second idea: the script copycover can do that for you. Get it from http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=22517 (you cannot download it via Get Hot New Stuff).
All my folders have an AlbumName.png image, and whenever I have to rescan my collection Amarok finds them automatically.
I seem to have a problem that it doesnt play another last fm stream if i have one currently playing. also if i stop a stream, it doesnt seem to be able to start playing it again
I'm using 1.4.9.1 and the "next" button does nothing. Even more, the "Ban" button says it is "banning track" but does not skip to the next one... any clue?
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