As some of you might already know, Last.fm is an online community based on musical tastes. You have to create an account (it’s free), install a plugin on your music player and your program will send statistics of the music you play in your computer to Last.fm.

Then you will be able to see what is the music you listen to the most, view recommendations, users with musical tastes similar to yours (called neighbours), create communities, blog, and many other things.

Besides this, Last.fm also offers personalized online radio. Using a free player downloadable from its website you can listen to many radio stations, including things like:

• Music your neighbours listen to.
• Music similar to a given artist/band.
• Music recommended to you by Last.fm
• Music tagged with a given tag.

The streaming quality is good (MP3 at 128kbps) and you can skip any track, and tell the player which songs you love the most and which songs you don’t want to hear anymore.

The player is very small and nice, and it is released under the GNU GPL license (you can access the Subversion repository too), so congratulations to the Last.fm people.

Besides the official player, a number of other compatible third-party players are out, such as Last Exit (GTK+) and Shell.FM (console). Recent versions of Amarok can also play Last.fm radios.

The official Last.fm player is available in Debian etch (testing). If you want to install it in a Debian sarge, you can use a backport. Just add 'deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ sarge-backports main' to your sources.list and run 'apt-get -t sarge-backports install lastfm'.