Rubenerd

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.