rickshangle.com

Or, I finally give last.fm a full-on try. My iTunes Library is backed up.

… read the following with the acknowledgement that I don’t really understand exactly what last.fm does for me… stay tuned and I’ll let you know. Because I’ve never let my complete lack of understanding surrounding a technology stop me from early and rapid adoption, often with associated destruction of my or someone else’s data/hard disk.
Last.fm, at least it has a cool name.
I stumbled onto it last (haha!) November, but multiple threads on various discussion boards indicated that iScrabble or iScrivener or iScabby or whatever the OS X what-music-you’re-playing-brain-sucker-client is called wasn’t quite ready for prime time kept me from locking in full-metal. Specifically the references to iMiniverShevy eating the iTunes Library file left me feeling sick and dry.

Well… by all appearances it’s still not quite ready for prime time (iScripeneyer been going out to lunch on my G5 PowerMac nearly constantly since I loaded it), but it wakes up from its coma on rare occasion and appears to do something. With what reliability still remains to be seen.

Sometimes when I reload my blog page containing my “last.fm now playing links!” they render… and sometimes they don’t! At the moment I write this it does render, but appears to be about 1-2 hours behind in my playlist. Whether this is due to the rendering, something puking in iShatner (which has been “red note” as opposed to “green note” for at least an hour) or the ubiqutous Other Cause is unknown. I’m not in Troubleshooting Mode at the moment; I’m in Let This Run Overnight And See If It’s Still Beating In the Morning Mode. And yes, I have backups.

And about half an hour ago, the last.fm site was unavailable… for about half an hour.

These are all to be expected, though. We’re just getting the party started.

Beyond the social/good-of-music-taste[1] humanity networking elements of last.fm, the primarily selfish motivation of getting rid of Now Playing, which went from sort-of-reliable to completely useless in about two releases (and whose developer hasn’t done new OS X versions recently).

So… I’ve read it takes about 300 songs of brain-sucking before the power really starts to kick in. Allright, God, let me have it!

rds

rds @ last.fm

ps. ok, I’m a simple creature… ditching Now Playing was half my motivation for finally trying last.fm… and the fact that Malloreigh Suicide[Girl] is part of why-don’t-you-sign-up? marketing kit was probably the other half. Good work, somebody. Check it!

[1] Way too many people (or robots) here apparantly hold Coldplay in way too high regard.