We’ve teamed up with Spotify to bring their entire catalogue, on demand, to the world’s leading music recommendation service. Whether it be your own profile page, artist pages or album pages – if Spotify has it, you can play it and control it on Last.fm via the Spotify playbar at the bottom of the screen. Using your Spotify account (premium or free) you can listen to any track simply by pressing the play button. This will load all tracks on a Last.fm page as a playlist in Spotify.

This new feature brings a depth to Last.fm like never before and gives you a much richer listening experience. The availability of over 20 million tracks at your fingertips allows you to listen to full albums as well as rediscover your scrobbling history – listen to your loved tracks, past charts and more.

This latest collaboration builds on an already successful partnership between the two services, which includes the highly successful Last.fm app on Spotify.

As with any new integration there are of course some known issues, so please bear with us! You can find out about them here and you can leave your feedback in the forums here

We’re hugely excited to bring this new functionality to Last.fm and can’t wait to see what you think.

Enjoy!

The redesigned home page features the same great content, but reorganised and given a much needed facelift. Your recommendations are now featured front and centre, with bigger images and a neat new layout. There’s also a new library section in the right hand column that gives an overview of your personal stats and recent activity. The changes aren’t all on the surface though; your new releases, events, and free downloads recommendations are now better quality, displayed more intelligently (based on your recent listening habits) and programmed to shuffle on each visit to the page. It’s never been easier to discover new music!

So, what if you’ve just joined Last.fm? Some of the most exciting changes are only apparent when you’ve got a brand new account. In this case, the redesigned home page helps to welcome you to the world of Last.fm with a simpler design and clear messaging about how to get your first recommendations and start scrobbling.

The improvements for new users don’t stop there – we’ve also updated our sign-up experience. Back in April we introduced a new account setup process which includes 3 simple steps. New users are guided through starting their library, setting up scrobbling, and completing their profile, before arriving on their home page with music and event recommendations ready and waiting. You can always revisit these steps, so if you haven’t seen them yet, check them out – the library builder is a lot of fun to play with!

In the coming weeks we’ll be making further improvements to the new home page, including the ability to dismiss recommendations. As always, we’re keen to hear your feedback on the changes we make and new features we introduce – please leave your feedback on the forums.

There are a lot of different things in moost. Some are really simple, yet very helpful in day-to-day work, like the which template that allows you to use pairs (and containers storing pairs) more easily with standard algorithms; or stringify, a function template that turns complex objects into strings. Other parts are slightly more sophisticated: for example, moost contains the framework that is shared by all our backend services, and that allows you to write a daemonisable service with logging, a set of standard options and even a service shell that multiple users can connect to when the service is running, all in a few lines of code.

As our backend services are inherently multi-threaded, there’s also a bit of threading support in moost. For example, the safe_shared_ptr template is immensely useful for resources that are shared between threads and need to be updated atomically.

If you’re working with large, static datasets, you’ll probably find the memory mapped dataset classes interesting. They allow you to build large datasets (like gigabytes of data) of vectors, multimaps or dense hash maps that can be simply mapped into memory — and thus shared between different processes — and accessed very much like a constant standard container.

moost also contains an abstraction for loading shared objects and instantiating objects defined inside these shared objects. It will take care of all the magic involved to avoid resource leaks.

There are more bits and bobs in there, like a simple client for the STOMP protocol, hashing and message digest functions, wrappers for key-value stores, template metaprogramming helpers and even a complete logging framework. So check it out, play with it and if you’ve got some nice tool to add, please contribute!

There’ll be more code coming up later this week that makes use of moost, so if you’re looking for some hands-on examples, stay tuned!

To be continued…

Last.fm’s MIR team is responsible for maintaining more than a hundred libraries, tools and backend services, most of which are written in C++, although some projects are in Python, Perl or Java. Back in 2011, all these projects had to be built from one giant Subversion repository, they contained hard-coded relative paths to other projects they depended on, yet as developers we would still have to know all the dependencies and build them in the correct order to actually build the project we were interested in. Also, every project contained a lot of boilerplate code and over time, this code changed, so it could be substantially different between any two projects. All of this made it quite painful to build projects or set them up for continuous integration, let alone distribute them to our production servers.

As we were thinking about migrating our codebase to Git, we wondered whether there was an easier way to build our projects. Our ideal solution at that point would have been a tool that allowed us build, test, install and package every project, regardless of the language it’s written in, with exactly the same command. We couldn’t find anything like that and so we decided to write our own tool, which we called mirbuild (for hopefully obvious reasons).

mirbuild is a meta-build-system, which means it’s basically delegating the actual build process to other build systems, but hides this behind a common interface. It is just a set of Python libraries, so the actual build scripts are written in Python. For a simple project, such a build script (usually called build.py) looks like this:

  #!/usr/bin/env python
  from mirbuild import *
  project = CMakeProject('libcyclone')
  project.depends('libmoost')
  project.find('boost')
  project.find('log4cxx')
  project.version('include/cyclone/version.h',
             namespace = ['cyclone', 'version'])
  project.run()

As you can guess from the class name, this project uses CMake under the hood. But if you just want to build the project, you don’t have to care. You just run

  ./build.py build

and it “just works”. But mirbuild does a bit more than just forwarding commands to CMake. For example, it will create a file that controls compile flags and include and link paths of project dependencies. It will also create a version header for your project if you ask it to do so.

Here’s are some of mirbuild’s features:

• supports CMake (C/C++), Python, Thrift (C++/Python) and “simple” projects
• can build, test, install and clean up projects
• can resolve dependencies between projects
• can create Debian packages
• can build different configurations (release, debug, coverage) of a project
• can run code coverage analysis tools

Over the last one and a half years, mirbuild has saved us from a lot of grief and it has made building projects a lot of fun. Thanks to mirbuild, we’ve also simplified our continuous integration framework and have now got all our production packages built on disposable virtual machines (but that’s a different story). If you’re maintaining lots of C++ code and aren’t happy with how you’re building it, check it out, it’s on Github.

To be continued…

We released this new desktop scrobbler as a beta a little under a year ago and have been spending the time since getting it ready for launch. A couple of weeks ago (15th Jan) that launch day finally arrived and we pushed it out to everyone on Windows, Mac, and Linux! If you’ve not already got it you can head over to our download page for a fresh copy.

Here’s a Youtube.com video of us reaching 200,000 authenticated users on the new app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy_VwcGazE4. Just look at how much fun we’re having!

The app comes with a new design and some features we hope you’ll really love. There’s a now playing tab where information about your currently scrobbling track will show up, including related artists, tags, biography, and scrobble statistics. Tracks played from radio stations will also show you a little context as to why the track is being played. A scrobbles tab where you can see a history of what you’ve been scrobbling and find out more about those tracks. A profile tab where you can see your scrobble charts. A friends tab where you can see what your friends are listening to and start their library radios. There’s also a radio tab where you can start all your usual Last.fm radio stations including a history of your recent ones.

We’re looking at the app as a baseline with which we can add and improve upon. There’s been a few ideas bubbling away that we can’t wait to add, but for now the focus is stability. With a large change such as this there are bound to be teething troubles and we’ve been taking your feedback on the client support forum and making sure we address problems and implement anything we might have missed that you loved in the old app.

A reminder that, like our iOS and Android apps, the desktop Scrobbler is open source and hosted on our Last.fm github page (both the liblastfm and lastfm-desktop repositories make up the desktop app) where you’ll also be able to find other things Last.fm have open sourced. If you’d like to get involved with development then head over there and fork us!

It’s been a long road getting to this point and I’d like to thank all the client team members, contributors, and believers past and present for making it happen. You know who you are and you’re all very wonderful!

Last.fm Scrobbler for Linux

We at Last.fm love Linux. Not only does it power almost all of the server machines that bring Last.fm to you, it is also the operating system of choice of many of our developers at Last.HQ. For our desktop application Last.fm Scrobbler, Linux is a first class supported operating system. The source code is available on GitHub if you want to have a go at building it yourself, but we also provide ready built packages for those of you who are using Debian or Ubuntu. Just go to http://apt.last.fm and find out how to install them. Today we release an updated set of packages featuring the latest version of Last.fm scrobbler (2.1.33).

We are also proud to release official packages of Last.fm Scrobbler for the Raspberry Pi today. If you have not heard about Raspberry Pi, it is an ambitious project to bring better teaching of programming and the technology behind computers to children. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity that has designed and developed a mini computer that costs less than £40 and allows not only children to dive into the world of computer programming. Being so cheap, the Raspberry Pi has also attracted many hackers to make new things based on this mini computer. Media centre solutions are already very popular, which is not surprising because the Raspberry Pi has a network interface and video and audio outputs. We now contribute our Last.fm client application to the Raspberry Pi universe. If you have a Raspberry Pi and are running the Raspbian operating system on it, then head over to http://apt.last.fm quickly and install Last.fm Scrobbler for Raspberry Pi!

Eleven years later, I have transferred my music library between many computers, over dozens of portable devices and now in the ether of a cloud. My digital library has been a constant companion, traveling the world and growing with me. I love my library!

Recent developments in streaming services are making the maintenance of a digital collection obsolete. Seemingly endless libraries are available for monthly rental, and internet radio services like Last.fm offer unlimited personalised streaming. There are so many new ways to listen to music now, that I sometimes forget about my carefully curated digital library.

It is with this in mind that the Scrobbler for iOS was created.

Introducing the Scrobbler for iOS, an iPhone and iPad application that not only natively scrobbles, but gives you several ways to re-discover your digital library.

We’ve long known that scrobbling iPhones has not always been a seamless process, so we wanted to create an application that alleviates this pain. We also wanted to offer our users with something new, so we built playlisting services that get applied to your digital library. For the first time, the algorithms that power Last.fm Radio can now be applied to the libraries you’ve spent years curating.

Every track in your library can be used to discover other, similar tracks. We use the power of machine tags and the knowledge of social tags to help you re-connect with the music you love.

Download the app here and join the group to keep up to date with announcements, forums and help.