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Comparison of Pandora and Last.fm
An anonymous reader writes "Blogger Steve Krause takes an interesting look at how music recommenders Pandora and Last.fm work, including some algorithmic strengths and weaknesses. Although he seems to think Last.fm is better now, his punchline is that a combination of their approaches will eventually be the real winner and for that, Pandora can more easily become like Last.fm than the other way around."
Both are great, but LastFM plays in Winamp and other players, while Pandora requires Flash in a webpage... so I prefer Lastfm. Related: www.TubesMusic.com will soon let users do either one when it's available, so I've heard.
I've played with both services as well, and I have now been a happy (and paying) last.fm user for several months. I don't quite share the author's enthusiasm about Pandora; in my case (and for some of the friends I tried it for), its recommendations were not quite that good.
The centralized music genome inventory that Pandora relies on reminds me of a Cathedral, while Last.fm is more like a Bazaar of babbling voices -- now I wonder where that metaphor comes from!
I think Last.fm has more potential because it is fundamentally a social service -- it feels a lot more like other open online communities I have come to know and love, whereas Pandora seems more like a black-box to me (something the review author also mentioned).
Last.FM is similiarly trivial to rip.
Each track is seperated by a string, "SYNC" which the player detects. It's pretty easy to copy the stream, split it into multiple files and automaticaly tag and name them correctly actually. It took me about 20 minutes to hack some Python together to do it.
Sigh, indeed...we've been planning this downtime (which involves a major upgrade to our streaming capabilities) for weeks now, so it would figure that we would get Slashdotted at precisely this moment!
We're also busy readying some cool new features to be released by the end of the week...subscribers will also have access to a beta site (beta.last.fm) later today to try out some of these new goodies.
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http://www.last.fm/user/flaneur
Back in the days of audioscrobbler there were frequent days and even weeks when the servers would be slow and sometimes even not record data sent, but since the swap of domain and name to last.fm it seems that they have worked out all the kinks. foobar2000 and last.fm work splendid on my windows box. I just wish there was some way to have two different plugins report to the same account. (Even if that led to abusing tags.)
...to each of these, is iRATE radio which uses collaberative filtering and user ranking of tracks to give you freely available music that you (hopefully) like.
With Pandora you don't even have to bother with stream rippers. What they do is to send you an XML encoded file containing information about 3 or 4 songs at once. One of these pieces of information is a URL of the mp3 file (128kbps) that the client downloads. Safari, for example, shows you these URL's in the Activity window where you can just double click to download the song. Very convenient (and dumb on their part).
Go to "Download" and select "I'm using an exotic platform" on the dropdown menu and it will give you the option to download the source code. It's not the most intuitive thing in the world, but it's there.
Direct link: svn://svn.audioscrobbler.net/player/trunk
You'll have to use subversion to download it.
I have no sig at all.
Last.fm used to offer you direct access through any mp3 player and, as such, it was easily rippable too. To use the service you now have to download their player, but Vidar Madsen, a GIMP developer, created a nice proxy that makes listening through regular players possible again. It is called lastfmproxy, and you might be able to rip streams from the URL it gives you too.
I have no sig at all.
It left out one of the biggest players -- Yahoo's Launchcast service.
I have been using this service for the last 4 years, and it's helped me to discover LOTS of new bands and songs that I prior would not have known about. I simply click on how much I like an artist, and so it plays more songs from that artist or songs from similar artists. I can rate albums, songs, and artists themselves, so I am getting results based on how an album sounds, a song sounds, or an artist in general.
So yea, Last.Fm is cool and all, but for those of us on the Launch bandwagon for so many years, it's hardly revolutionary.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I haven't ever used last.fm, but I've played around with Pandora and like it. But, the author makes the same mistake I see everyone that uses Pandora do at first - entering an artist to seed the station. Because Pandora's algorithms work at the song level, you get much better / more consistent results putting in a favorite song or two from a particular artist than their name.
Or you could just look in your /tmp directory.
1. Excellent concept
2. Excellent database of obscure music artists. Any name I threw at them, there was an entry for it. I even uploaded some album pics
3. Friendly community
and now the bad.
1. The last.fm player is horrible. Horrible usability, and often I just get nothing for music. Can't use it at work. Prior buggy version muted itself unless you gave it exclusive focus.
2. The audioscrobbler plug-in often refuses to handshake.
3. The combination of both is a bit obfuscated.
4. You see just how badly tagged Mp3s across the world are. You often find the wrong tracks, or 20 similarly-named tracks of the same song for an artist. Not last.fm's fault, but it would be nice someday to fuzzy logic them together.
5. A bit bureaucratic in getting artist images uploaded. If it's an unpopular artist, it will never get the # of votes needed to surface.
Erm, thats the whole point! You can use last.fm without sending them your song info... but it would be fairly pointless... as they base their radio stations and recommendations on the songs you listen to.
There is a freestanding radio player if you don't want to install it. But the audioscrobbler plugin is the whole point of the service. I think its even integrated into newer versions of xbox media centre.
It takes a while to work out the kinks and build a good profile i'm really liking the service after a few weeks using it... and the fact you have a page that shows what you listen to, and can use it to build cool forum sigs showing your recent fave songs is great too.
BTW/ the players have an option NOT to send songs to fast.fm (for trying out new random stuff) and you can always delete songs from your profile (if your sister has been listening to britney behind your back!)
That may be true on the search; however after you start sending stuff to last.fm you will get "reommendations". On your recommendations page, you can change the weight from "more popular" to "more obscure". Then you don't have to filter through the pages of clear-channel crap that relates to the artist, you can see some actual music filter in :)
I suspect that what's happening here is that data from Audioscrobbler ("what tracks are like / liked by people who like other tracks") is there but the actual track that you're after isn't yet, for example:
+ of+Old+England
http://www.last.fm/music/Les+Barker/_/Hard+Cheese
Ones that are have a "preview" button, like this one:
http://www.last.fm/music/Runrig/_/Ribhinn+Donn
(to take the example of what happens to be playing at the moment).
I think last.fm's "similar artists" link is working the way that it is supposed to - it does what it says on the tin. The actual radio player works similarly to what it sounds like you want.
If you want to find new stuff, start the radio and select "discovery mode" off the settings menu - it'll only play stuff it hasn't played before.
If you hear something that you don't want to, hit "skip". It'll learn.