macJasp

Putting trust in Last.fm

I normally find new music via the usual places, through the radio or from discussions with friends but after constant prodding from the last.fm recommendation service recently about Turin Brakes I decided to take a chance and purchase their Optimist album from 2001. It thinks that because i like Doves, Badly Drawn Boy and Elbow (which I certainly do) that Turin Brakes is right up my street. I don't have a single Turin Brakes record in my collection, I know of one of their songs from the early part of the last decade (2003's Pain Killer), so I'm putting faith in the service to find me this type of new music that I'll hopefully grow to love and begin wondering why I hadn't heard of them sooner, after all that is the whole point of last.fm, right? If anything it's to be an interesting experiment as to whether the site really can work out my musical tastes based on what I play regularly and I'm very much hopeful that this particular choice will enable me to trust the service more in future.

Scrobble to last.fm from AppleTV

I've recently purchased an AppleTV for my front room to replace my Airport Express, which I had been using to stream music via AirTunes. I love the device, however now that my AppleTV is my main music player i'd noticed that the last.fm app i was using to scrobble my tracks from iTunes on my Mac wasn't taking into account any music i'd played through the AppleTV, but after a bit of searching I found the ideal 3rd party scrobbler app

Scrobblepod

Scrobblepod is free, lightweight, runs in the taskbar and best of all scrobbles music i've played through iTunes, my iPod, iPhone and best of all, my AppleTV. Any music played on the AppleTV is scrobbled to last.fm the next time the device syncs with iTunes.

Customising what you scrobble

Another nice feature i noticed upon using Scobblepod was that via the settings you can also set certain iTunes tracks to be ignored from scrobbling altogether. I have plenty of audiobooks which i'd rather not send to last.fm, so it's a nice touch from the developer and makes this a killer app as far as i'm concerned and very worthy of a mention.