To save myself some trouble, here's a description of Audioscrobbler from the front page of its website:
"In a nutshell, Audioscrobbler endeavours to be your personal music advisor. It grows to know what music you like by monitoring what songs you play on your computer. From this information you can discover other users that share some or all of your taste in music. You can also view data showing what your most-played artists are, and find out who likes a particular artist the most. Basically The Audioscrobbler Project is turning into a fantastic way of discovering new music, and discovering people who like the same music as you."
I'll say that it's very interesting, and it's beginning to do what it says it can do. The setup is really easy. Go to the website, register, then download and install the winamp plugin, and make sure you enable it. That's it! The plugin runs completely transparent, and even caches data if you are offline. Then you can go to the Audioscrobbler home page and view your statistics as well as the statistics of others. To give you a feel for what you will see, here are some stat pages to look at:
My personal stat page
What people are currently listening to
The most popular artists. (It's pretty rock-centric)
What Jackson, Keyur, Dan and Gautam are listening to. Tag your songs G!
The the creator, RJ, made it has a project for one of his CS classes, and it just took off. There are forums with active people, and they are actively improving the system every day. It's a little rough around the edges some time, but still pretty neat. Hopefully people will find new artist they like with this system. If nothing else, it gives stat-whores like me something to look at.
Posted by ramk at April 11, 2003 07:27 PM