It's REALLY important you know I have cool taste in music December 2, 2011 1:39 PM Subscribe
Is the Last.fm widget busted? For several weeks I've just been seeing "Couldn't load the tracks from Last.fm" on my profile and everyone else's, using both Firefox on OSX and iOS.
ok, removed. We'll leave the "show widget on profile" setting in preferences for Last.fm for now. If they don't have it fixed in another month or so we'll take that down too.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:51 PM on December 2, 2011
posted by pb (staff) at 1:51 PM on December 2, 2011
By the way, I've been keeping an eye on their support forum for updates on this. Their list of known issues from Nov 17th says: "Chart Images: These are currently not working."
In another thread a staff member says, "It will come back, however the issue was that this service was not maintained for years and needs a not insignificant amount to work to bring it up to speed. We are working on it though."
posted by pb (staff) at 1:56 PM on December 2, 2011
In another thread a staff member says, "It will come back, however the issue was that this service was not maintained for years and needs a not insignificant amount to work to bring it up to speed. We are working on it though."
posted by pb (staff) at 1:56 PM on December 2, 2011
Aww boo that they don't have their act together! Should've known it was on their end though, definitely wouldn't go so long without a fix around here. Thanks!
posted by yellowbinder at 1:57 PM on December 2, 2011
posted by yellowbinder at 1:57 PM on December 2, 2011
Basically everything about Last.fm is broken these days.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 2:10 PM on December 2, 2011 [4 favorites]
posted by Threeway Handshake at 2:10 PM on December 2, 2011 [4 favorites]
Man, I'm so bummed they got rid of the "x many plays" stat in the weekly views. It was fun seeing how my listening habits fluctuate depending on how busy I am. Studying in front of a computer? 500+ plays for the week.
posted by Phire at 2:16 PM on December 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by Phire at 2:16 PM on December 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
Is there a way to switch back to the styled text profile widget and bypass the imagegen issue entirely? It was so much more convenient a while ago being able to click on the names of individual tracks versus now (well, while the image serve was working) being only able to click through to a Last.fm profile.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:22 PM on December 2, 2011
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:22 PM on December 2, 2011
Inspector.Gadget, not without going back to local storage. We were scraping Last.fm and storing every track that every member played. It worked well, but we realized we were storing and managing millions of pieces of data for a simple profile feature. Most of these services provide the same features already so we felt like we could rely on them instead of reinventing the wheel. We don't want to go back to scraping/storing.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:28 PM on December 2, 2011
posted by pb (staff) at 2:28 PM on December 2, 2011
Ah. Thanks for the clarification, pb.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:42 PM on December 2, 2011
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:42 PM on December 2, 2011
Why don't you just fetch the last.fm data at profile page view? I don't know from CF, but there are any number of other server-side include modules that could handle code to pull text from another website and then include it in a dynamic page. Of course, the bad part of that is that you're waiting on their server. (Combine this with the timed-update thing in the next paragraph: when it's generated, write the html to a file or to the db and timestamp it, then have a freshness test to see if it's fresh enough to include in the profile. If not, then fetch it again. Make the freshness a reasonable number, like five minutes. Then, you'll only fetch the data when someone wants to see it, and you'll only fetch it at most once every five minutes.)
With regard to putting it in the db for the profiles for everyone who has it enabled, I don't understand the "millions of pieces of data". If a user enables the last.fm scrape, then only for those users pull the data once an hour, or so, and update the database with it.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:26 PM on December 2, 2011
With regard to putting it in the db for the profiles for everyone who has it enabled, I don't understand the "millions of pieces of data". If a user enables the last.fm scrape, then only for those users pull the data once an hour, or so, and update the database with it.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:26 PM on December 2, 2011
If a user enables the last.fm scrape, then only for those users pull the data once an hour, or so, and update the database with it.
We currently have 1,478 members that link to Last.fm. Imagine each of them listen to ten tracks per day. We're up to 14,780 discrete pieces of information. Over a month we get to 443,400 pieces of data. Over six months we're up to over 2 million pieces of data. In reality, the numbers are much higher. Some people listen to hundreds of tracks/day.
Another issue is pulling down that much data every day. To get a user's last 10 tracks, we have to download their entire Last.fm feed. Many times per day. We might only keep a fraction of it if there are new items, but scraping 1,000+ feeds every hour is not the business we want to be in. We'd rather focus our resources on making MeFi great and keeping core services running well.
I hear you on just grabbing the feed on demand. I think that'd work fine if we weren't concerned about the speed of profile pages.
The widgets offered by services like Last.fm, Twitter, and Flickr are supposed to be designed for speed. They have solved this problem, in theory. I'm not happy that Last.fm's widget isn't working, but I do feel like this is their problem to solve.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:39 PM on December 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
We currently have 1,478 members that link to Last.fm. Imagine each of them listen to ten tracks per day. We're up to 14,780 discrete pieces of information. Over a month we get to 443,400 pieces of data. Over six months we're up to over 2 million pieces of data. In reality, the numbers are much higher. Some people listen to hundreds of tracks/day.
Another issue is pulling down that much data every day. To get a user's last 10 tracks, we have to download their entire Last.fm feed. Many times per day. We might only keep a fraction of it if there are new items, but scraping 1,000+ feeds every hour is not the business we want to be in. We'd rather focus our resources on making MeFi great and keeping core services running well.
I hear you on just grabbing the feed on demand. I think that'd work fine if we weren't concerned about the speed of profile pages.
The widgets offered by services like Last.fm, Twitter, and Flickr are supposed to be designed for speed. They have solved this problem, in theory. I'm not happy that Last.fm's widget isn't working, but I do feel like this is their problem to solve.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:39 PM on December 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
"To get a user's last 10 tracks, we have to download their entire Last.fm feed. Many times per day."
Yeah, that's stupid. If they're going to make that information available for this kind of use, there's a whole bunch of ways in which they should be making it easy and resource-light for both themselves and anyone who wants to use the data.
I'm eleven years out of date, but worrying about the scalability and robustness of dynamic web sites for enterprise-level customers was part of what I did back in the day. In fact, it was pretty much the only part of what I did that really interested me.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:48 PM on December 2, 2011
Yeah, that's stupid. If they're going to make that information available for this kind of use, there's a whole bunch of ways in which they should be making it easy and resource-light for both themselves and anyone who wants to use the data.
I'm eleven years out of date, but worrying about the scalability and robustness of dynamic web sites for enterprise-level customers was part of what I did back in the day. In fact, it was pretty much the only part of what I did that really interested me.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:48 PM on December 2, 2011
Basically everything about Last.fm is broken these days.
agreed. Anyone have any good alternative suggestions? I basically just use it for this purpose - to automatically scrobble the tunes I listen to off my computer, and then link to it on various online profiles rather than typing out my ever-changing musical tastes.
posted by mannequito at 4:13 PM on December 2, 2011
agreed. Anyone have any good alternative suggestions? I basically just use it for this purpose - to automatically scrobble the tunes I listen to off my computer, and then link to it on various online profiles rather than typing out my ever-changing musical tastes.
posted by mannequito at 4:13 PM on December 2, 2011
FWIW, you can get a user's last 10 tracks in an RSS feed from http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/last_fm_user_name/recenttracks.rss
posted by hoppytoad at 4:34 PM on December 2, 2011
posted by hoppytoad at 4:34 PM on December 2, 2011
Speaking of last.fm, has anyone been able to use iSproggler since the new iTunes came out? It depends on a smart playlist for recently played tracks, and that seems to be broken.
posted by griphus at 9:49 AM on December 3, 2011
posted by griphus at 9:49 AM on December 3, 2011
Spotify y'all. Time to make the switch.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:02 AM on December 3, 2011
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:02 AM on December 3, 2011
Can Spotify keep track of songs played on an iPod/PC/etc. that aren't played through Spotify?
posted by griphus at 10:39 AM on December 3, 2011
posted by griphus at 10:39 AM on December 3, 2011
It's revealing that spotify itself and many of its add-ons and such scrobble to Last.fm. They really are two different, but related, things. They go well together. The beta for spotify has "apps" and includes one that integrates part of Last.fm.
I've spent much of the last twenty hours messing with this stuff: spotify, last.fm, mpd, and various utilities, add-ons, and clients for them.
I wish that we could have a link to spotify usernames on the profile. I have some vague understanding that these services have to actually be web browsable and spotify just has a stub that opens a user profile in the spotify client...but that would still be really helpful. Because you are limited to sharing with friends, there's this whole need for friend groups, and there's websites that have sprung up to answer this need. But no one wants to sign up for some other website just to be able to share music with other mefites. If spotify usernames were available in MeFi profiles, then we could just add them (by hand, apparently, in spotify) to friend those mefites and then exchange playlists and stuff with each other. Please?
"Can Spotify keep track of songs played on an iPod/PC/etc. that aren't played through Spotify?"
No, that's not at all what it's intended to do. There's still a need for scrobbling, if perhaps less so Last.fm. I dunno. Maybe someone should build a better (but very focused) music tracking server and associated clients/modules/add-ons.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:11 PM on December 3, 2011
I've spent much of the last twenty hours messing with this stuff: spotify, last.fm, mpd, and various utilities, add-ons, and clients for them.
I wish that we could have a link to spotify usernames on the profile. I have some vague understanding that these services have to actually be web browsable and spotify just has a stub that opens a user profile in the spotify client...but that would still be really helpful. Because you are limited to sharing with friends, there's this whole need for friend groups, and there's websites that have sprung up to answer this need. But no one wants to sign up for some other website just to be able to share music with other mefites. If spotify usernames were available in MeFi profiles, then we could just add them (by hand, apparently, in spotify) to friend those mefites and then exchange playlists and stuff with each other. Please?
"Can Spotify keep track of songs played on an iPod/PC/etc. that aren't played through Spotify?"
No, that's not at all what it's intended to do. There's still a need for scrobbling, if perhaps less so Last.fm. I dunno. Maybe someone should build a better (but very focused) music tracking server and associated clients/modules/add-ons.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:11 PM on December 3, 2011
You can't have a spotify account without a Facebook account, which is a deal breaker for some of us.
posted by winna at 3:17 PM on December 3, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by winna at 3:17 PM on December 3, 2011 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I looked at Spotify and decided what I really needed was for Last.fm to be fixed already. Then again I've been a member for something like four years and it's never really worked well. All I really want is to play things in my "it totally looks like Winamp 2.x" client and have the titles, etc., broadcast to whoever is interested in looking at the data (including me, for times when I'm just dying to know if the so-and-so has finally overtaken such-and-such in my all-time frequency list.)
posted by SMPA at 3:23 PM on December 3, 2011
posted by SMPA at 3:23 PM on December 3, 2011
"You can't have a spotify account without a Facebook account, which is a deal breaker for some of us."
Yeah. I've been off Facebook since July of last year. I systematically deleted everything I had ever written or put on the site, all my info, absolutely everything except a notice that I decided to leave. Then I deactivated the account.
Of course, it never really goes away. If you go back and log in for some reason (which, with the associated stuff, is easier to inadvertently do than you might thing), then you're "welcomed back to Facebook!" Sigh.
But I really wanted to try out Spotify the other day. This was prompted by the mixswap thread and the mention of it there and I was intrigued. So, I activated it but refused to let it post anything to it. And I have no friends, of course. Now that it's active, I might get someone finding me making a friend request, but I'll just ignore it.
So, I don't mind so much. Facebook will end up knowing when I've used Spotify, of course. But that's tolerable. It was more the idea of reactivating the account that bothered me. If you've never signed up for one, then I imagine that would be even worse. But just make a dummy one with an apparently real name. Unless it's a principle-of-the-thing thing. Which I understand, too.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:40 PM on December 3, 2011
Yeah. I've been off Facebook since July of last year. I systematically deleted everything I had ever written or put on the site, all my info, absolutely everything except a notice that I decided to leave. Then I deactivated the account.
Of course, it never really goes away. If you go back and log in for some reason (which, with the associated stuff, is easier to inadvertently do than you might thing), then you're "welcomed back to Facebook!" Sigh.
But I really wanted to try out Spotify the other day. This was prompted by the mixswap thread and the mention of it there and I was intrigued. So, I activated it but refused to let it post anything to it. And I have no friends, of course. Now that it's active, I might get someone finding me making a friend request, but I'll just ignore it.
So, I don't mind so much. Facebook will end up knowing when I've used Spotify, of course. But that's tolerable. It was more the idea of reactivating the account that bothered me. If you've never signed up for one, then I imagine that would be even worse. But just make a dummy one with an apparently real name. Unless it's a principle-of-the-thing thing. Which I understand, too.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:40 PM on December 3, 2011
For such a major website, last.fm is maintained terribly. There were about four weeks this summer where artists couldn't upload new MP3s at all.
posted by dunkadunc at 5:49 PM on December 3, 2011
posted by dunkadunc at 5:49 PM on December 3, 2011
You can't have a spotify account without a Facebook account, which is a deal breaker for some of us.
Has something changed since when they first came to the US? Because I have a spotify account but no facebook.
posted by inigo2 at 2:46 PM on December 4, 2011
Has something changed since when they first came to the US? Because I have a spotify account but no facebook.
posted by inigo2 at 2:46 PM on December 4, 2011
Yes, new accounts require Facebook now.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:51 PM on December 4, 2011
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:51 PM on December 4, 2011
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posted by pb (staff) at 1:48 PM on December 2, 2011 [1 favorite]