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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

  1. 1
    Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit"
    5 people · 416 points · first shared 2009 · 101 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription
    5 people · 44 points · first shared 2009 · 42 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Last.fm Blog: Quality Control
    4 people · 85 points · first shared 2008 · 18 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Mapreduce Bash Script
    4 people · 47 points · first shared 2009 · 5 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Last.fm Blog: Library and streaming services outage
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    Last.fm founders quit
    1 people · 139 points · first shared 2009 · 38 comments on HN
  7. 7
    SSD Streaming at Last.fm
    1 people · 79 points · first shared 2009 · 23 comments on HN
  8. 8
    Python + Hadoop = Dumbo
    1 people · 73 points · first shared 2008 · 1 comments on HN
  9. 9
    Last.fm makes music free to listen to
    1 people · 27 points · first shared 2008 · 6 comments on HN
  10. 10
  11. 11
    Last.fm Xbox Launch War Room
    1 people · 23 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
  12. 12
    Mining Valentine's Day listening trends
    1 people · 14 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
    Hadoop User Group UK
    1 people · 8 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
  14. 14
    Lyric clouds, genre maps and distinctive words
    1 people · 7 points · first shared 2011 · 3 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Last.fm radio subscriptions
    1 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
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
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
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

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