Monthly Archives: October 2007

Vagalume: a Last.fm player for the Nokia N800

These days I have been working on Vagalume: a Last.fm player for the Maemo platform (Nokia N800 and N810, though it’s designed to work on a regular PC Gnome desktop as well).

It’s still very small and doesn’t do much (I started it just a few days ago) but since it already works and has the most basic features that a Last.fm player must have I decided to release it.

Don’t expect a UI with lots of colours and shiny buttons in this release: I have been concentrating mostly on the protocol so the UI is stripped to the bare minimum.

Here’s a sample screenshot (taken from the scratchbox):
Vagalume Last.fm player

Features:

  • It plays Last.fm radio streams (using the Last.fm protocol v1.2)
  • You can select any radio (Personal, Neighbours, Loved Tracks …, or any arbitrary URL)
  • It implements the Audioscrobbler Realtime Submission Protocol v1.2, specifically:
    • It sends Now Playing information
    • It scrobbles tracks (so you’ll see what you’ve been listening to in your profile).
  • It is stable, I’m using it everyday and I haven’t experienced hangs or other strange behaviours so far.
  • It’s small (the binary is less than 50K).

What it doesn’t do (yet):

  • It doesn’t have the ability to Love/Ban/Recommend tracks
  • It doesn’t have a nice UI
  • It doesn’t show album covers on the screen
  • …and many other things

You can install Vagalume in your N800 (with Internet Tablet OS 2007) using this package.

I plan to release the source code under the GNU GPL later this week and I’ll probably build packages for Debian and Ubuntu as well, so you can use this program in your PC. And of course there will be packages for the upcoming Internet Tablet OS 2008 (N800 and N810) too.

And that’s all, folks!

Updated 31 Oct 2007: more packages here.