last.fm changes

last.fm/ (formerly audioscrobbler, sortof) has generally been one of my favorite sites. It’s a site that lets you download a plugin to your mp3 player of choice. It then tracks your music listening habits (mine are here), aggregates a network of people with similar tastes, and even lets you stream a radio station with selections from your “network”. But it seems they’ve changed their radio station. Previously, it was just an mp3 stream (as any audio stream should be, really), but now you have to download their “last.fm player” to use it, which is pretty retarded. Why are they investing all this time in developing an mp3 player – talk about re-inventing the wheel.

Well, I tried it out, to be not a naysayer, and it’s not too bad, except the music skips like crazy and I couldn’t figure out why – there are no settings for buffering or bitrate quality or anything like that. It’s especially disappointing since generally they were a pretty OSS/geek-friendly site – they even have RSS feeds for recent tracks. Oh well. Another good idea down the toilet. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, guys!