The special thing about this website is that it remembers what genre of music you love to hear, and it even recommends you some other tracks of the same type too. All it requires of you is to register free as a member and you can start scrobbling! Well that term literally means to listen to songs and automatically saving them for future listening.
Easy to use GUI
One good reason to get your daily dose of radio from here is that the music is encoded at 128kbps, which means the songs dished out are of a decent mp3 quality! I'm particularly impressed with the stereo quality of the songs. Not a hint of noise can be detected at all (maybe because I'm kinda turning deaf?).
And the list of advantages go on; there are no DJs trying hard to be funny even though this is an online radio. Of course, being a radio station, you wouldn't get to choose the songs you wish to hear. Just pop in an artist's name and relevant results will be displayed. AND, being a radio station, you could not possibly download most songs, with the exception of those that are authorised to be downloaded by the rights holders.
Tracks are being played at random, and it's a refreshing idea because you would not have to tolerate those 'oh I know what will be the next song in my computer/mp3 player' moments. I guess those people who like to set their players to random mode will appreciate this website. Listening to last.fm has also exposed me to other artists whom I have never heard of before. At least it'll give me an idea of what albums to browse when I step into HMV next time.
Being an enthusiastic mobile software hunter, I've stumbled across this software that was created by last.fm. An online mobile player! But currently it only supports Symbian 60 3rd edition series, so those Nokia N/E Series (even some Samsung or older models of Nokia phones) are able to support this software. There's a whole lot more details in the following URL if you are interested.
Mobbler download for Symbian S60 3rd ed
It'll be better if your phone is WIFI enabled. No charges at all. If you are thinking of using GPRS, ler siao boh ? I can only say it'll be more economical that you go back to your FM tuner and enjoy the static noise. The economy nowadays is a big Ecstasy-induced head shaking. The only thing to do is to register at last.fm first before you can start listening to your favourite tracks. Below are a few screenshots that I have captured for your viewing uh.. pleasure?
Once the application is open, it will automatically search for a connection option.
Select a mode to search from
My favourite!
Pressing the top navigation key will save your track as a 'loved' track, pressing the down key will be banning that track. I mean, which radio station nowsday nowadays allow us to condemn a song completely? Pressing the * and # keys will reduce or increase the volume respectively.
Album art. Yipee!
A few things I do not like about this software is that if I press my center (select) button, the track might suddenly stop playing and I'll have to go through the hassle of entering another artist's name and wait for it to load. Also, if you are multitasking with other programs, the songs tend to get choppy. To overcome this situation, I had to lie still on my bed and NOT multitask at all. I value music quality more dearly than my laptop mouse. Hmm.
Other than these shortcomings, you could press the right navigation key to forward to the next title, which is a step better than conventional radio! At least streaming speed is acceptable, unlike some Youtube vidclips which sometimes load till the cows come home for me to eat them up.
That's all for this review, it's time to enjoy some high quality on-demand radio now!
Some updates: There's actually a Free Mp3 download page in last.fm! http://www.last.fm/home/freemp3s
Sources:
http://www.last.fm/
http://www.reference.com/search?q=Scrobbling
http://code.google.com/p/mobbler/
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