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Is it anything like Last.FM, or does it run independant of other users? If it runs independant of other users, I'd say Last.FM would win in that category, because it's showing you what other people that listen to the same music that you do like.
I think Last.FM and this have the same aim, recommending music you might like, but I think Last.FM pulled it off better.

A similar setup exists at last.fm where you build up a record of what you like by having your player app synch with the community server ... then you can listen to their custom streamed radio and discover a lot of stuff which is all kept on record.

(Apparently they're upgrading their hardware today...)
http://www.last.fm/

Granted, the streams are mostly well known stuff but there is some content on there so indy I've met the artists online accidentally!

I would really love to see Last.fm use it. Then my musicplayer could find music for me and in true amarok-style, it will also search for the album-cover and lyrics.

Try last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler). Works by analyzing what you listen to the most and comparing it with others. Great system.

You can create a profile in audioscrobbler (last.fm). I've discovered lots of new sounds that turned out to be what i was looking for.

http://www.last.fm/user/paco_cotera/

Last.fm is a great way to expand your musical horizons, and introduce yourself to new artists that you're very likely to find enjoyable.

I've been using the site for a year, and not only finding great new music, finding it on smaller labels (such as Projekt), and even independent artists (Hungry Lucy, Collide). In fact, I'm finding a lot of these artists that I like better than just about any RIAA crap, because the ones recommended to me are very tailores to my tastes by the site.

I recently heard about this music streaming service. The idea behind the project a plun-in (Open source) for your favourite music player collects song names of what you are actually playing. These get uploaded onto your own musical profile page. This page shows stats and gives you general idea of your musical tastes.

You can create tags (ala flickr, gmail etc.) for your songs, artists, and albums. These tags are cool because you can see what everyone else has tagged and then stream music from the globally tagged data.

From your data, the system generates musical "neighbours". Last.fm provides neighbour radio that plays songs that your neighbours have listened to but you haven't.

Speaking of data, the stats collected is published with a creative commons licence. This is accessed via a bunch of web services.

For the control freaks not content to let someone eles dictate their songs selection, the artist pages are browsable and linked by similar artists (also generated from user data).

There's more features, but I think this is the kind of stuff (music listening) slashdotters would be interested in. Obviously I'm a fan on this service.. I just found out about them a couple months ago. If anyone has reccommendations for alternative services, I have an open mind.

http://www.musicbrainz.org/ Musicbrainz already has music fingerprints. Albiet, it's not exact, but it's there. Easy to add your own music and fingerprints.

http://last.fm/ Last.FM already is a place where you can listen to music based on music you like, for free, with no commercials.

At least at those two sites I can find more than just the top 40.

Seems appropriate for the /. crowd, but definitely not my music.

I don't get too down on mainstream stuff, but I do realize that most people just don't have enough exposure to a good variety to find some of the less-popular stuff that they'd also like. I know this because I was there once, before finding means to discover new, less well known artists.

As an alternative, I would recommend checking out Last.fm. The site allows users to track all the music they listen to on their PC, and it processes the data to create "similarity" data between artists based on what people actually listen to, instead of just purchasing data.

It will also find a user a set of musical "neighbors", other people with similar artist interests, and recommend new music based on those neighbors.

I've found a TON of new stuff through the site, and highly recommend it to anyone else who listens to music on the PC. It's so easy to use (sign up, install a plugin, enter username/password, and forget about it) it's almost silly NOT to use it.

Yeah, it's not bad... though I entered "The Eyes of Truth" by Enigma, and got a crapload of Disco thrown back at me by the place. Gawd, did I hate that! It's kinda soured me on the whole thing.

Last.fm, however, I'm nuts over. It uses listen data to recommend new artists, not purchase data - so it does a good job of connecting artists. I've found a ton of new music through using the site - the bulk of what I'm listening to now is stuff I didn't even know about a year ago.

Here's an idea for combining this model with other models for recommending music. Take the recommend the song based on structure model, combine it with the recommend the songs based on what other people who listen to music like you list to model (e.g. last.fm), and add the Amazon purchasing model to it. Combine that data with specific user feedback... things like what time of day does the person listen to this song, group, genre... what day of the week, what's the weather like (b/c it impacts mood), maybe even how many keystrokes they're type (working?), and add personal rating options, information about whether they listen to the song all of the way through, etc.

So, the application for that data is that you should be able to hit the play button on your media player and it should based on the time of day, weather, etc. be able to create a playlist for you based on your past behaviors. Then allow for simple controls, either to increase/decrease tempo, define the mood/style you're interested in at that time, or other simple subjective hints. Of course you should also be able pick specific songs/playlists, artists, etc. if you want to help seed the list or listen to something specific. Combine that with a streaming audio service, that would occassionaly inject a stream of a song into your playlist that you don't own but that matches your tastes and current mood, and offer you the chance to purchase it and you might have another way to sell/market music online.

something like http://last.fm/ suggestions?

Can we stop calling them "blogs" now?

I don't personally have any problems with words "blog" and "weblog". That in itself is a good distinctive word for this kind of sites, even if you're not speaking generally of "news sites" or "online journals" or anything. I might describe last.fm a "music charts system with tagging and weblog features" and not even blink.

The derivant words drive me crazy though. I'm a blogger but if you call me a "multi-blogger" or something, I might get violent. =)

But if I use an idiot proof content-management system to "type" my web page instead of "coding" it, I'm then creating a blog.

Nope. A weblog is a type of a site. CMSes just happen to be the most convenient way of managing them.

I was writing my first "Blog by a Clueless Teenager Geek"-type of site in 1998 in raw HTML with nothing but emacs in my side, it just happens to be hell to maintain =)

Once you start putting pictures and links on your blog, you're making a webpage...

Umm, what is exactly wrong with adding pictures and links to blogs - just using the web technologies as it's meant to be used? And in case you didn't notice, "weblog" originally meant just that: people linking to sites and pages they've found. Hell, these days, people write blogs that do nothing but link to some article (in another blog or elsewhere) and say "hey, my thoughts exactly". Hell, Slashdot is a blog that does usually nothing but link.

If you find yourself running a bunch of servers all with similar spec/config, you should consider removing the disks from them and netbooting off a single image on another server (or a single image available one 2 other servers just in case). Disks are far more likely to break than any other component imo, far more likely than fans or PSUs if you ask me.
As for RAID5, it's not always practical, but bear in mind if you buy all your disks from the same mfg at the same time, your chances of concurrent failure are increased. (the batch the disks came from may be suspect). You could buy disks from different manufacturers. Hot spares are always handy too.
The webservers for last.fm are all diskless and boot off a single debian image. Makes it helluvalot easier to upgrade/update them. We use Perlbal (from the LiveJournal crew) as a reverse-proxy load balancer, which works nicely.

I think you have been listening to Nurse With Wound a wee bit too long.

http://www.last.fm/charts/

There's some crossover there, (e.g. Green Day) but no Mariah Carey.

The poster of the previous comment above mentions Audioscrobbler, and this reply was really prompted by that.

If you're not familiar with either - Audioscrobbler works out links between different artists based on what people play (via music player plugins) and last.fm is an online radio station that uses that information.

As an example:
http://www.last.fm/explore/?artistname=chumbawamba

http://www.last.fm/charts/

There's some crossover there, (e.g. Green Day) but no Mariah Carey.

The poster of the previous comment above mentions Audioscrobbler, and this reply was really prompted by that.

If you're not familiar with either - Audioscrobbler works out links between different artists based on what people play (via music player plugins) and last.fm is an online radio station that uses that information.

As an example:
http://www.last.fm/explore/?artistname=chumbawamba

You can get charts on exactly what people are listening to: http://www.last.fm/charts/

If this is your bag, you're better off going with last.fm, who recently combined with audioscrobbler. Using a tiny plugin to your computer's music player, it uploads what songs you listen to, then builds an index and finds neighbors to your listening habits in the database. Then, get this, you get to listen to music straight off of those neighbor's profiles, so you can find new music reeeeally easily.
From what I understand, there's work being done in getting it to work with an iPod, so when you plug in it checks to see what songs you've played and sends those up to your profile. Rockin!

Bonus points for both technically and funkily correct use of the term "funkadelic". Now just apply the PsychoAlphaDiscoBetaBioAquaDoLoop to your Computer Games and you'll have scanned yourself beyond all recognition.

If you are interested in something like that, check out Last.FM powered by AudioScrobbler. It will let you know other people who share your same musical interests. Instead of "rating" songs, it simply analyzes what you listen to and lets you know what others listen to.

AudioScrobbler plug-ins are available for many popular players.

That's exactly why I love last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler & Last.fm). It automatically tracks what you listen to and then allows that information to be used to give you neighbors in the music world based on what interests you have in common. You can add friends, join groups, and even tag your music. All of this is extremely useful in finding new stuff. They've got plugins for all the major media players (and even some minor ones).

Add on top of that the ability to play a custom-built radio station, set it to play only new music or listen only to music from a particular user profile.

Linux and BSD supported! Open source plugins and radio station player! Could it get better? ;)

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but make sure that the last line
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http://www.last.fm/help/player/

Interestingly, it has an OSX, Linux static binary, FreeBSD and FreeBSD AMD64 version and QT4 BSD licensed source.

So is this just late 90's radio? That's what it looks like.

http://www.last.fm/help/player/

Bob

Last FM is a great concept. Basically it uses a system similar to Amazon's recommended links. You download their player (don't worry, open source, BSD license, Mac/Linux/Windows) and you type the name of a band in the box. It then streams music the database thinks is similar. You can vote to skip, ban, or love a track.

When you've done it for a while you'll have your own profile. You can then go and listen to music that your "musical neighbours" are listening to.

Lots of indie music on there. Lots of everything on there.

Bob

(Not affiliated with them)

They probably won't have licenses to rent those DVDs.
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  My last.fm page

Yeah but try surfing the web from you deck.

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  My last.fm page

At what rate do you think we should have, so that no one steals? There is always something just out of reach.

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  My last.fm page

I think what he's saying is that Mitnick was not really a criminal, that the media made him do it.
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  My last.fm page
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http://www.drudgereport.com for the truth.

No one should build cities in places that are below sea level.

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My last.fm page

sid was teh kid who destroyed toys, in Toy Story.
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My last.fm page
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Husi is where's it at

I hope his 'to' is strong.

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My last.fm page

I purposefully did awful on any and all standardized tests. How does a teacher influence that?

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My last.fm page

A persons pay should be based on factors that in the end they have no control over.

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My last.fm page

And install the Mirrordot and CoralCache extensions. Automatic linkage.

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My last.fm page

He can't really protect anything.

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My last.fm page

They don't have unemployment in the EU!

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My last.fm page

Were there more traditional bombing runs though?

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My last.fm page

Since no one runs as root, that would just delete the home directory. No real biggie, the robot has backups right?
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My last.fm page
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Husi is where's it at

You were quite rational with points like "It's safer if I go really really fast, trust me."

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My last.fm page

I always thought it was Indie - as in Independent... My favorite music site of the moment is Last.FM. It's a streaming service, and they ask for a small donation, but the beauty of it is that they match your preferences with others who have similar tastes, (using Audioscrobbler )so you can listen to new music that you might not otherwise hear...

it's great for finding what the new music would be named.. not actually for finding great and free music in audio.

Ah, this is true, but Audioscrobbler's sister site, Last.FM features streaming radio that features tracks culled from your "neighbors" library (profile radio) and YOUR library (personal radio). The latter requires a donation after the 30 day trial, but the former is always free, and is a great way to hear new music based on your "musical neighbors".

it's great for finding what the new music would be named.. not actually for finding great and free music in audio.

Ah, this is true, but Audioscrobbler's sister site, Last.FM features streaming radio that features tracks culled from your "neighbors" library (profile radio) and YOUR library (personal radio). The latter requires a donation after the 30 day trial, but the former is always free, and is a great way to hear new music based on your "musical neighbors".

it's great for finding what the new music would be named.. not actually for finding great and free music in audio.

Ah, this is true, but Audioscrobbler's sister site, Last.FM features streaming radio that features tracks culled from your "neighbors" library (profile radio) and YOUR library (personal radio). The latter requires a donation after the 30 day trial, but the former is always free, and is a great way to hear new music based on your "musical neighbors".

it's great for finding what the new music would be named.. not actually for finding great and free music in audio.

Ah, this is true, but Audioscrobbler's sister site, Last.FM features streaming radio that features tracks culled from your "neighbors" library (profile radio) and YOUR library (personal radio). The latter requires a donation after the 30 day trial, but the former is always free, and is a great way to hear new music based on your "musical neighbors".

Go and try Last FM. This one is even better: they team up with AudioScrobbler.

Basically works like this: they keep a play list of all the songs you play through their on-line station, or in your favorite MP3 player. They try to match your play list to other play lists that contain more or less the same songs, and stream that selection to you, so you end up with a stream of music you really like but which you may not know yet.

Works really well in a musical sense, and it is legal, but server wise it is a bumpy ride. Even without slashdot posts this service is an on/off business.

http://www.last.fm/

There's an even easier way to find more music that'll match well what you like.

A pair of web sites: AudioScrobbler and Last.FM.

AudioScrobbler tracks what you listen to (via an unobtrusive plug-in for your media player), then after a few hundred listens, matches you up with other people that have been listening to similar artists. The listening information is also used to generate listings of "similar artists" for each artist on the site. As this is all based on what people actually listen to, instead of "genres" or other stuff, it is remarkably accurate.

Then Last.FM uses this profile generated for you to customize streaming radio just for you. It plays songs that are found in your neighbor's profiles, though you can mark those you really like or dislike to alter what you hear.

It all works together to help you find new music yourself, and influence other peoples' listening habits.

In fact, about half of my top 50 artists are ones that I've discovered over the past few months thanks to the site. That's more new music that I enjoy at once then by any other means ever.

Here are some Projects that may be of interest to readers.

Streamer P2P Radio
AudioScrobbler
Last FM