Audioscrobbler

You might have noticed the new link at the top of my music column. It's for a relatively new (or new to me) service from Audioscrobbler.

You download and install a plugin that corresponds to the media player that you use for music (itunes, winamp, windows media player, etc) and the plugin keeps track of what you listen to. It then reports this info back to audioscrobbler where it compiles a musical profile for you. Once you have listened to several songs, it will generate a list of other musical artists that are similar to the ones you listen to.

Another cool feature about the site, is that it creates an RSS feed of your recently played tracks, and you can use that feed to do cool stuff on your website. If you click the link of my recently played tracks, you can see the songs that I have just listened to. You can also generate an image that shows what song I am currently listening to. Very cool, huh?



And if you use Feedburner for your feeds, you can use the audioscrobbler feed in feedburner's Headline Animator to make the following:



Keep in mind that these services are relatively new, and may stop working at any time because of huge demand and server overloads. Audioscrobbler has been especially buggy over the last few days.