Rubénerd ツ

My obituary post for the Last.fm Free is Free group turns out to have been premature. Less than a few days after writing up said post I’ve been informed by the group leader that they’re back in business by popular demand.

[FREE IS FREE] We Will Continue To Our Strike

If you want to continue strike, we will continue…
But we must accept that we must increase our striking level.

And if we want to reach the result, we must study more…

Group will not be closed and our strike will be continue…

We will take back our free’dom with our power…

NEW STRIKE WILL BE ANNOUNCED 04.08.2009 AT 21.00, FOLLOW US…

P.S: Thanks for all positive/negative comments for continuing strike. Our group won’t be closed, decision is cancelled…

Free Is Free Founder
Oguz Kaan Cagatay Kilinc

I wish them the best of luck in their efforts, but to be honest I’m doubtful their efforts will make any impact. Last.fm has made clear their intentions to stand beside the RIAA and to charge customers outside areas of the world they perceive as being worth their trouble, and I doubt anything but a complete exodus of users would change that.

I encourage those who want to scrobble and keep track of their played tunes online to move over to Libre.fm and import your Last.fm profiles.

The end of an era. No I’m not talking about someone pulling a Vincent Van Gogh (oh come on, that was a quality joke), I mean that one of the groups on Last.fm which was started in direct response to the site forcing customers to pay for streaming if they lived outside the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany has shut its electronic doors.

[FREE IS FREE] We Have Learned FREE IS NOT FREE

We found this group to have free last.fm again. We reached thousand of last.fm users, we stroke last.fm with several methods.

But we forgot one thing, Free’dom Is Not Free, Free’dom is under control of some bosses.

We are so sorry, because we are not succeed.

Thank you, thanks for all supports and ideas…

We reached the end…

Note: Group will be closed in this week. Some materials are transferred to okck.net to be archived, you can reach these materials with last.fm label on www.okck.net.

Free Is Free Group Founder
Oguz Kaan Cagatay Kilinc
http://www.okck.net

I’ve long since moved to Libre.fm for my scrobbling needs but it’s still sad to see this happen. I bought more than a few CDs in direct response to being recommended various tunes on the site, but this won’t happen any more, at least with them. Oh well, their loss.

In the meantime I’m listening to a Rod Picott CD I bought after hearing it Whole Wheat Radio from a country outside the US, UK and Germany no less! Whole Wheat Radio (tune in directly here) is a website with independent music and therefore is unencumbered by the fleeting, nonsensical whims of the RIAA. I like a little nonsense now and then, but not in this context!

I tend to listen to Whole Wheat Radio during the early afternoon, and my own music later in the evening. Since using Libre.fm to scrobble music I’ve noticed many artists I listen to haven’t been in their database before and are subsequently automagically added. What a mouthful.

The latest such artist is Michael Franks! Currently if you click any of these covers, I’m the only one who’s played him, even Popsicle Toes and Tiger in the Rain. Unfortunately I don’t have all his music in CD form, I inherited from my mum all his classics on original LPs but as far as I know I don’t think any scrobbling client currently supports such archaic devices :).

The great thing about being an early adopter of a service is you get to be part of the site during important milestones like this. Well, at least I consider them important. As Michael sang in one of his songs: "Just continue reading me…" which doesn’t make sense given he’s a singer/songwriter not an author. I guess I could read along with the lyrics. Why do I talk to myself so often here now? Can senelity set in when you’re 23? Don’t answer that.

I wrote my Michael Franks music review back in January 2007.

UPDATE: This post was supposed to go live on Tuesday, but when I overshot my bandwidth allowance I dropped everything and forgot to publish it. Given the only image is being hosted on Flickr not here, I suppose this one is okay.

It seems all I’ve talked about this beautiful Tuesday is music! So lets keep the blogging ball rolling and discuss Libre.fm, the website I mentioned earlier today that I’ve migrated to after Last.fm’s latest shenanigans.

Libre.fm is a music scrobbling and sharing website that runs on the free and open source GNUkebox software which you could even host yourself if you wanted to. With a bit of technical know-how (more on that below), you can import your existing plays from Last.fm, and in return you get a profile page with your most recent plays, a complete history including artists and songs you’ve played the most, and the opportunity to join groups.

As reflected in their current URL though, Libre.fm is very much in alpha and still a bit rough around the edges. For one thing, you need to edit your hosts file to redirect scrobbles from your Last.fm client to Libre.fm given no software (so far) has been designed for it; the official Last.fm client won’t work. To export your plays from Last.fm also involves downloading and running a few Python scripts. The links I sprinkled in above direct you to their Wiki with guides showing you how to do it.

ASIDE: I’ll be posting in more detail how to set it up if you’re interested, for now if you’re technical I created a Libre.fm account with the same username and password as my Last.fm account, then downloaded iScrobbler and appended 89.16.177.55 post.audioscrobbler.com to my /etc/hosts file. So far it seems to be working beautifully.

You can now find me over at http://alpha.libre.fm/user/rubenerd/. I’m not going to close my Last.fm account just yet, but I won’t be scrobbling to it any more and have updated my profile there to reflect this.

Back in March I talked here about Last.fm’s decision to start charging users outside the United States, United Kingdom and Germany for the right to stream audio. Initially I was quite angry about it, but eventually realised that they were probably bullied into doing it by old media companies and that all they were guilty of was poor execution.

It seems now though there’s further evidence of unscrupulous activity on Last.fm’s part, and it has to do with sending listening information to the RIAA in the United States. You can read the whole saga on TechCrunch (Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?), the Last.fm blog (Techcrunch are full of sh*t), and TechCrunch again (Deny This, Last.fm), but if you want the quick lowdown Paul Richard Cook summarised it very well on a posted message on the Last.fm site.

Even if the Last.fm team had no idea this was happening as they claim, and even though I’m outside the de jure jurisdiction of the RIAA both in Australia and Singapore, this still really rubs me the wrong way. It’s creepy this kind of behavior is going on, though to be fair we should all have expected this when they were bought out by CBS.

I really enjoyed my time with you Last.fm, but we must part ways now. My lifeboat has left the ship and I’m now rowing over to Libre.fm which will be the topic for another post. Sayonara.