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.