John has been working in the Last.fm client code and prepared some nice patches, so here’s a new minor release for Debian etch (1.0.9.6-0etch3) and Ubuntu edgy (1.0.9.6-0edgy3).

Changes include:

• Some leaks were fixed, so now the client wastes less memory 😉
• A new ALSA plugin has been introduced.
• Users can select the web browser from the options dialog.

Get the full changelog and source code at John’s page.

As usual, compiled packages are available from my webpage. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Enjoy!

I’m pleased to announce the availability of new Debian and Ubuntu packages of the the latest version of the Last.fm client for x86 systems.

New versions have been released by the Last.fm team, being 1.0.9.6 the current one. However the only official download for GNU/Linux is still several months old and lacks the newest features and bug fixes.

I have been combining efforts with John Stamp and we have prepared packages for Debian and Ubuntu. We’ll try to keep them updated with every new release from Last.fm (you can subscribe to this blog’s feed for announcements if you want to).

Go here for downloads and more information.

These packages are unofficial and they haven’t been tested thoroughly, so comments and suggestions are welcome.

Merry Christmas for you all!

P.S.: I’m sure that some of you know where I took this post’s title from. Highly recommended, of course, and not just for these dates 😉

I wrote about Last.fm some time ago in this blog, and mentioned some of the programs you can use to listen to this internet station.

However, the previous official player is deprecated and no longer supported (although it still works) as the Last.fm team has released a new client (in beta stage for GNU/Linux systems). This new client can be downloaded here, but there’s no Debian package, just a precompiled binary in a .tar.bz2 file. Moreover, this binary does not work in sarge, the current stable release of Debian.

As this new client is GPL too (congratulations!) I downloaded the source code and made a Debian package ready to run in sarge systems. You can get it from my webpage. I have been using it successfully for some time, but any comments regarding its packaging are welcome. Enjoy!

Updated 03-12-2006: I also built another package for Debian testing (etch). You can download it from the same page I mentioned above.

Updated 04-12-2006: Now a package for Ubuntu edgy is available too!

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'.