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Last.fm Blog
blog.last.fm · Company blog · on HN since 2007
The Last.fm team writes about the music service's engineering, business announcements, outages, and data tools like a MapReduce bash script.
What HN saysHN links it for the BashReduce script, which one commenter favors over Hadoop, and for company announcements such as radio subscriptions and outages.
36HN people shared it
15linked it in comments
35stories submitted
1.0Kstory points
3 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit"5 people · 416 points · first shared 2009 · 101 comments on HN
- 2Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription5 people · 44 points · first shared 2009 · 42 comments on HN
- 3Last.fm Blog: Quality Control4 people · 85 points · first shared 2008 · 18 comments on HN
- 4Mapreduce Bash Script4 people · 47 points · first shared 2009 · 5 comments on HN
- 5Last.fm Blog: Library and streaming services outage2 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 6Last.fm founders quit1 people · 139 points · first shared 2009 · 38 comments on HN
- 7SSD Streaming at Last.fm1 people · 79 points · first shared 2009 · 23 comments on HN
- 8Python + Hadoop = Dumbo1 people · 73 points · first shared 2008 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Last.fm makes music free to listen to1 people · 27 points · first shared 2008 · 6 comments on HN
- 10Last.fm launches crowdsourcing experiment for tempo (BPM) detection1 people · 26 points · first shared 2011 · 10 comments on HN
- 11Last.fm Xbox Launch War Room1 people · 23 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Mining Valentine's Day listening trends1 people · 14 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 13Hadoop User Group UK1 people · 8 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 14Lyric clouds, genre maps and distinctive words1 people · 7 points · first shared 2011 · 3 comments on HN
- 15Last.fm radio subscriptions1 people · 6 points · first shared 2009 · 8 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
helwr · 2011-06-11
A good list of hadoop alternatives: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-promising-open-source-alternatives-…
my personal favorite is BashReduce (~120 lines shell script vs ~600k lines of java code in hadoop): http://blog.last.fm/2009/04/06/mapreduce-bash-script
If you're in bioinformatics you might be interested in this talk on handling ridiculous amounts of data (PyCon 2011): http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-handling-ridi…
zippy · 2016-09-02
http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement
"In all other countries, listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month."
ninetax · 2012-09-05
This may be of interest to you,
http://blog.last.fm/2009/04/06/mapreduce-bash-script
nl · 2011-09-08
They published a story they got from a source, which turned out to be (mostly) wrong.
References:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-over-user-li…
http://blog.last.fm/2009/02/23/techcrunch-are-full-of-shit
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/deny-this-lastfm/
I don't see how that is Arrington's "need to interject himself into the stories"
PidGin128 · 2011-07-18
Since the originally submitted link was deleted from last.fm's forums, here's the replacement, and a link to their blog:
http://blog.last.fm/2011/07/18/library-and-streaming-services-outage
http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/756231
icebraining · 2011-07-16
You're missing living in (or proxying to) the UK, US or Germany, where it's still free.
http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement
ianbishop · 2010-09-24
http://blog.last.fm/2009/02/23/techcrunch-are-full-of-shit
Perfect example.
jzting · 2010-03-11
last.fm has some cool systems as well: http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control
i especially like the build status bears :)
tyweir · 2010-03-09
Last.fm has (or had) something similar and quite sexy as well:
http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control
superjohan · 2009-09-26
"last.fm is still 100% free."
Except in other countries than the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.
http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement
jacquesm · 2009-07-06
the original article:
http://blog.last.fm/2009/04/06/mapreduce-bash-script
jwilliams · 2009-03-24
It's the former, sort of... See the comment on the post titled "Joost, HodgeStar, et al": (I can't find a permalink)
"These are the countries in which we have the most resources to support an ad sales organization, which is how we earn money to pay artists and labels for their music."
Edit: Found the permalink: http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement#c007521
SwellJoe · 2009-02-15
Fun, but I think I still prefer the angry red test failure bear:
http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control
novafacing · 2022-09-17
I have some suggestions. Now, I'm a bit of an audiophile and also I'm willing to deal with amounts of jank that others find intolerable. YMMV.
I use Deezer as a music service. It's $15/month for HiFi comparable to Tidal's HiFi subscription. Tidal, however, has DRM that does not allow it to play on Linux as a webapp nor does it have a Linux desktop app. Tidal's out. Now, here's the interesting thing: I never use Deezer to listen to music.
- I use Deemix Server (https://download.deemix.app/server/) to serve a webapp on my media server. This plugs into my Deezer account and I use it to download FLAC quality audio into my media server.
- My media server, of course, runs Plex (https://www.plex.tv/). I have a lifetime pass and it's totally worth it, but keep in mind it is required for this setup.
- Locally on my (phone|laptop|desktop) I use Plexamp (https://plexamp.com/). Plexamp is a beautiful high quality player with no bells and whistles but does one thing really well and that's play my music.
- Since this is all offline playing downloaded files, I use last.fm which plugs into both Deezer (https://blog.last.fm/2012/01/06/scrobble-with-deezer) and Plex (https://www.plex.tv/blog/plex-media-server-v0-9-12-5-a-tasty-update/) for recommendations, tracking listening, and connecting with friends. Honorable mention to MusicButler (musicbutler.io) which used to be free and simply notifies you of new releases for a "Release Radar" experience.
All this combines to be a less seamless…
albertzeyer · 2012-04-23
Some more info:
This is from Last.fm developers, esp. RJ (Richard Jones), mxcl (Max Howell; the guy behind Homebrew) and others.
The current source is written in Erlang. https://github.com/RJ/playdar-core
There is some old abandoned source written in C++:
https://github.com/RJ/playdar
I found this while searching for the Boffin source code. Something about Boffin:
* http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/11/introducing-boffin-lastfms-music-knowle…
* http://www.last.fm/group/Audioscrobbler+Beta/forum/30705/_/510180
And in the abandoned C++ repo, there is something about Boffin (haven't really looked much into it yet):
https://github.com/RJ/playdar/tree/master/resolvers/boffin