Sunday, July 30, 2006

The Next Last Broadcast

I have only recently discovered Last.fm, and having tried numerous other music resources of a similar type, such as Pandora and radioblogclub.com, I will say that this is the best so far. Easy to install and use, it plays you streams according to the criteria that you have entered at log-in. Unlike Pandora, which feeds off a central database and often throws the worst types of approximations of your taste at you, Last.fm is peer-supported, so you can rely upon the past choices and gradings of like-minded people to guide you serindipitously towards nuggets that you might otherwise never hear of. And even stuff that you have known well for many years sounds different when bracketed by unknown bands from North Dakota. Be careful to refine your search criteria though; I picked 'folk' and folk only and the first two tracks thrown at me were Ben Harper and Alanis Morrisette. Computers are only 0's and 1's after all.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi.. I tried to access last FM but the screen comes up blank and there is a sign I do not recognize at that start of the address .. do you know wht i am missing and why I cannot visualize the page?

seanachie said...

Hi anonymous (no doubt, you're not near as anonymous as you thought you were).I don't know exactly the nature of your problem but I had trouble first time I accessed it. I think I may have accidentally sown the seeds of the problem by putting a hyper-link to my own dashboard, hence your inability to get through. Just try www.last.fm and proceed from there. Download the player, configure the account and away you go.