What's Up With Xbox Media Center

November 07, 2005

Last.fm Support Added

Last.fm support has been added to the newest versions of Xbox media center. Last.fm is a social music community that allows you to share your listening habits and tastes.

Last.fm offers plugins to all of the major audio players that are available. The plugins track and upload which songs you are listening to and the site then aggregates that data in a lot of different ways. One way allows others to browse a large status page of your listening habits. Check mine out.

While the capability of uploading your data to last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler) has been around for a while, you're now able to take advantage of one of last.fm's coolest features. Having all of your musical taste aggregated on their site, Last.fm does a great job in introducing you to newer bands you might not have heard of. The site will lead you to other users with the same musical taste, and you can listen to their "feed", an audio stream of all of their music.

Now Xbmc can play these feeds. Just place a "lastfm://" URL into a .stream file and launch it with Xbmc. Xbmc even supports the song names and album art.

Thanks to the awesome readers, its been revealed that you can even add "lastfm://" URLs to your music shares. Just set your user name and password in the Audioscrobbler section of the settings and add:

<bookmark>
<name>Last FM</name>
<path>lastfm://</path>
</bookmark>


to your bookmarks in the music section of your XboxMediaCenter.xml file, and you'll be able to view your top artists and and track listings as well as your neighbors' listings. Pretty slick. I can't wait to try this.

This is a pretty new feature, and it looks like it has a good amount of time being devoted to it right now. With a publicly available API, Last.fm functionality is only going to get better.

13 Comments:

  • I'm glad you cleared that up. I had no idea what lastfm was in the CVS log until you told me it was AudioScrobbler.

    By Blogger Matt, at 9:57 PM  

  • put last.fm:// not in a .stream file. But add it in your xboxmediacenter.xml file like.
    Then you can browse trough the audioscrobbler system

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4:47 PM  

  • To expand on what Anonymous said above. If you add a bookmark in xboxmediacenter.xml in the same way as you would for say an SMB share you can then browse last.fm and view your top artist/album/track lists as well as your neighbours just like they were folders on your xbox. Pretty cool huh!? Just add a bookmark like the one below (and make sure you have your audioscrobbler username/password set in the MyMusic settings screen (replace '[' and ']' with '< and '>':

    [bookmark]
    [name>Last FM[/name]
    [path>lastfm://[/path]
    [/bookmark]

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5:40 PM  

  • wow, thanks for the heads up guys. I was hoping that would be a feature. Launching a .stream file doesn't seem very user friendly.

    But being able to browse all of that sounds awesome. I can't wait to try it.

    By Blogger Jon, at 5:51 PM  

  • Awesome, time to upgrade...

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:16 PM  

  • ...so I realize this is not really a help forum BUT....trying to get last.fm running and could use a bit of assistance. Able to browse etc but no luck getting a stream to play... dialog starts but no music ! username/pwd all in place... ideas?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:15 AM  

  • same as anonymous (above) all seems set up correctly... yet no joy.

    By Blogger Scott, at 1:28 PM  

  • Cheers - this may sound really simple but how do you save the last.fm// as a .stream file ??

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5:26 PM  

  • Cheers - this may sound really simple but how do you save the lastfm:// as a .stream file ??

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5:27 PM  

  • can't get it to work due to handshaking problem. created the bookmark, entered the user-info..

    could it be that the "_" in the username posts a problem?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12:34 PM  

  • your instructions could be far more intuitive. They make absolutely no sense in configuring this.

    By Blogger TeQ, at 8:53 PM  

  • I was just wondering..
    Having to do with one's last fm page, do your neighbors on last fm. have anything to do with whether they have viewed your page often or not?

    Or is one strictly a neighbor because they have similar musical tastes as you do?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:42 PM  

  • very cool, thx for that!
    Sepp

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:28 AM  

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