Listening to music on Linux just reached new heights today 
(er, for me, I mean. This thing has obviously been around for some days now)
Last.fm aka Audioscrobbler are introducing “social radio”. Integration with Audioscrobbler means the system can figure out your “taste” and make recommendations. This is much like Yahoo! Launch, except its even better! Here are some of the highlights:
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Listen to personalized radio stations, even on Linux.
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Rate music and organize music by “tags”
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Listen to global tags, your personal radio station or other people's profiles
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For a small monthly fee, you can upgrade your account for some advanced features.
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The player is open source, and free (the Linux version is written with Qt4, I believe)
The FAQ is very well written and really does answer most of the frequently asked questions (like how to get the player working from within Firefox)
Check out my Last.fm page
This is so cool
Tags: music, technology
3 comments
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August 29th, 2005 at 6:07 am
Henning Schmiedehausen
They are in for a number of nasty surprises, probably including a patent law suit. Their player bundles mpglib which is clearly GPL (see lame.h e.g.), so redistibuting as “BSD license” is not really a good thing to do. And it contains all the MP3 algorithms that are patented.
August 29th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
diwaker
IANAL, so I really don’t have anything to add — you may well be right, but I would suspect that Last.fm would have researched fairly obvious bit well; I mean, they’ve been around for a while now.
The LAME website says:
bq. The decoding functions provided in LAME use the mpglib decoding engine which is under the GPL. They may not be used by any program not released under the GPL unless you obtain such permission from the MPG123 project (www.mpg123.de).
Maybe they took permission or something?
August 14th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Law News
Good post. Bookmarked.