Shoutcast

This is a free radio app that features thousands of internet streams. Its works great over wi-fi and 3G and features a good selection of niche stations. It allows you to add favourite stations and also search. At present I am listening to Dubstep.fm and Digitally Imported.fm. The quality of the streams is pretty good and the only drops in connection I have had are due to having a weak 3G signal.

Last.fm

This app needs little introduction. A great way to listen to over five million songs, share music via your phone contacts; purchase tracks and albums from the iTunes Music Store, and much, much more. By using the recommendation feature its a brilliant way to discover new artists. you can even save tracks you like to new playlists on your phone and then access this from the Last.fm app on your Mac or PC.

Noteworthy

NoteWorthy allows you to search through Last.fm’s powerfully awesome database of artists with ease and then mark albums and tracks that you want to remember. Select information like biographies and similar artists to download as well. This is great when listening to the Shoutcast as a way to remember tracks as the DJ announces them.

Simplify

Enjoy songs from home while at work or from any WiFi location. Explore friends’ music while they are online. This app is great as I can stream any of my 20,000+ tracks to my iPhone.

You may be thinking one thing – the above apps are great but what if I want to do something else with my iPhone while using these apps. At present Apple doesn’t allow 3rd party apps to run in the background. This means for example that you can’t listen to Shoutcast and read email or browse Safari at the same time. The answer to this is a tool called Backgrounder. You will need to Jailbreak you’re iPhone to get it, but this is a simple process now. Read here for how to do it. Don’t blame me if you mess things up though!

With Backgrounder you can allow certain apps to run all of the time. This is great as I don’t get interupted from Last.fm each time an SMS comes through. Be careful not to allow too many apps to run as your iPhone will become unstable due to low memory. I have tested all of the above apps with Backgrounder for the last week now without any problems.

Shazam is also another great tool to find music. Create and share music moments and stories. With Shazam you can identify music tracks simply by holding your phone near to the music source, buy them, and share the tags with friends. You can also learn more about artists; keep and grow your music collection and personalise your tags.

This did work fine when I had it running locally, I may post a video of it in action instead of the demo. In the meantime I am thinking of another tool. The other day I worked out how much my iTunes collection was worth based on 79p/track. The figure was over £18k!! Maybe a little tool to work out your last.fm value based on your plays would be fun, if I was feeling cheeky this could be linked to how popular each artist was. It may even be nice to plot these against your friends in a share index style way. Pretty much anything is possible with the api so when I have a few spare minutes I will give it a try.

A had a spare two hours this morning so decided to see what I could make in that time.

This new mash-up is a little different. You give it your Last.fm username and it will go and find your top artists. It then uses this to find the top tags for each of those artists. It then orders the tags by the amount of times they occur across your top artists and displays the result to you in a slider window. The images are pulled from Last.fm and they are for the top artist for each tag. The image resolution is based on the quality of the image on the Last.fm servers.

I used the Last.fm PHP API available from here as the basis for the mashup. There were quite a few sample scripts and I hacked a some of these together to get the functionality required. The slider part came from here.

You can view it by heading here and putting in your username. Please be patient as it takes a while to load everything in. Update! This keeps crashing my server so I will post a video of a locally run version.

I can’t wait for Spotify to release their own API as there would be the possibility to generate Spotify playlist based on your ‘loved’ tracks on Last.fm for example.

Read more and check it out here - http://www.blog.sizzla-media.co.uk/plugins/

Hope you like it. 

Any feedback add them to the comments – enjoy

I have hacked the Last.fm for WordPress plugin from here to search Spotify. At present I don’t plan to release the plugin but will do shortly after I have tidied up the code.

You can test it out by firstly downloading Spotify from here. Then simply click on the green note icon next to the track in my sidebar (under last.fm) to launch Spotify and play the track.

An image of my Last.fm side bar

There is no API for Spotify yet but a bit of digging around in the Greasemonkey script enabled me to send the track name and artist to a search within the Spotify app. Hopefully an API will be available soon which will allow me to do a lot more with the great service.

The icon is taken from the Spotify/Last.fm greasemonkey hack.

All rights are with the original developers of the code.