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The Technology Behind Last.fm
CNET's Crave has up a detailed interview with Last.fm's Matthew Ogle, the company's head of Web development. Reader CNETNate notes that Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world. From the interview: "We stream all music directly off our servers in London. We have a cluster of streaming nodes including a bunch of powerful machines with solid-state hard drives. We have a process that runs daily which finds the hottest music and pushes those tracks on to the SSDs streamers that sit in front of our regular platter-based streaming machines. That way, if someone is listening to one of our more popular stations, the chances are really good that these songs are coming off our high-speed SSD machines. They're fast because every song is sitting in memory instead of being on a slow, spinning platter." The interview is actually on two pages but pretends it's on three.
Just replace SCSI & IDE with SSD & Platter and pretend we already did this fight 15 years ago.
Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world.
I'd love to know how much of that was stuff like Britney Spears.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Reader CNETNate notes that Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world
Where did the submitter get that impression? Certainly not from the article. It mentions that they scrobbled 275,000 years of audio. Scrobbling is what Last.fm's client does when it takes a song you are playing from another source and uploads the meta data to them. Clearly that uses much less bandwidth than streaming a song
So now even the submitters aren't reading TFA anymore? I know, I know... its slashdot. /sigh
I'd say at least an Ice-age worth.
Last.fm is definitely a way to feel awkward with friends. Some of my acquaintances are well-read, well-dressed, well-spoken people, the sort who really seem to have it all together, but then you can never really manage the same level of respect for them after you've seen their Last.fm profile is nothing but Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga.
56,904,147 plays (1,246,583 listeners)
http://www.last.fm/charts
:)
What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.
They have detailed week-by-week charts going back to 2005. Lady Gaga is in fifth place this week is at 1,923,168 plays by 92,208 listeners.
Muse, The Beatles, Radiohead, and Coldplay precede her, but that's likely due to the fact that Last.fm is based in the UK and the majority of their users from the UK* and that those bands are much much better
I really hope that was an attempt to dumb it down for the article. It's a pretty poor way of describing the difference between HDDs and SSDs. After all, HDDs are a form of non-volatile memory too. They just happen to have a mechanical aspect.
In fact, the only way in which they could stream music without having it all in memory first is if they were using a microphone and a live band. Sure, it might make for an entertaining data center, but it's not very scalable.
Beyond that, our streamers are all running Linux and using MogileFS -- which is an open-source distributed file system, which is a little bit like a software RAID system.
OMG Files a lot of files served with MogileFS.
Last.fm is definitely a way to feel awkward with friends. Some of my acquaintances are well-read, well-dressed, well-spoken people, the sort who really seem to have it all together, but then you can never really manage the same level of respect for them after you've seen their Last.fm profile is nothing but Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga.
i love it when people are being snobbish about their music taste.
English, you insensitive clod.
This is precisely why I rarely listen to radio, whether it's streamed or broadcast over the air. They place too much weight on "the hottest new music", and this causes otherwise good music, which may not be "today's hottest new music" to be buried in the background noise. Not to mention that "the hottest new music" then gets played over and over, 100's of times a day on popular radio stations. This get boring and monotonous really quick. While radio can be a good way to discover new bands, I rarely listen to it for long periods of time because it just repeats the same tracks over and over. It's a very lopsided system that promotes the hottest single-of-the-day at the expense of everything else.
"I'd love to know how much of that was stuff like Britney Spears."
Unfortunately, you'd probably have to measure that metric in Libraries of Congress.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Nothing...because it's not a country, it's a kingdom. British and Irish is the most coverage you're going to get.
the bastard started charging $6/month for everyone a month or so back. only the US, UK and germany are temporarily free. before committing data to the service better check the TOS and decide.
What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.
'British' is used for UK residents, not just the residents of Great Britain. It therefore includes Northern Ireland. For example 'British Government' is a term often used by the UK government.
And your playlist was composed of?...
What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.
Only if you're a republican; plenty of northern irish identify themselves as "british".
Why is that? I didn't realise that ones taste in music could be such a defining characteristic.
Are you also this snobbish about peoples choice of software, clothing, transport?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
... so this article is not really journalism, but rather marketing.
You mean it discludes Ireland, and not Northern Ireland. Yeesh
Many of those people did everything right, stayed out of trouble, never questioned authority, and are generally conscientious but lacking in personality and interesting life experience.
Shit, at least my friends wait until they're really drunk before they break out the Toby Keith.
Unfortunately, you'd probably have to measure that metric in Libraries of Congress.
I hope that's an SI unit, else you run the risk of offending the metric nazi's ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
UKanian? ;)
They're fast because every song is sitting in memory instead of being on a slow, spinning platter."
Aren't the HDDs (the one's with platters) still considered memory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory
Computer memory refers to devices that are used to store data or programs (sequences of instructions) on a temporary or permanent basis for use in an electronic digital computer.
What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.
American. After all, they're called the 51st state since lil' Tony Blair and his adventures in the middle east.
It still confuses me why their "psytrance radio" keeps pulling in Britney Spears.
I've used last.fm for 4 years with about 19,000 scrobbles and this makes their recommended radio stations pretty damn good. However, I'm confused at the 'destroying Spotify' bit. To me they are completely different services that complement each other. I certainly couldn't use one without the other...
>What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.
That's OK, we prefer it that way.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
>Why is that? I didn't realise that ones taste in music could be such a defining characteristic.
It's a generational thing I suspect. Many people of my generation (I'm mid forties) very much define people by their music, especially what they listened to in their youth. The particular sub culture you belonged to as a teen was strongly related to your musical tastes and general mindset. These days, fashion/tribe is still important but the music side less so - you can have kids who dress the same but have very different tastes in music.
An additional point is that a lot of people get caught up with the various hype machines and buy in to certain artists even though in all truth, they're a bit crap. This marks them out to the rest of us as being a bit mindless, easily led etc.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Hardly. 'English', 'Scottish', and even 'Irish' people are all really Welsh; they're just too embarrassed to admit it. Something about the silly place names...
What do you call someone from the UK? .
a subject
A lot of her scrobbles get deleted though:
http://playground.last.fm/unwanted
We actually measure our bandwidth usage in Libraries of Congress. True Story.
discludes
You mean excludes?
From TFA:
We give the labels a breakdown of which artists should be accruing what royalties, so they have fairly good information on what they should be paying who.
Given what we've heard about record labels, who wants to bet that when this "fairly good information" gets to the record label it is printed on nice soft paper, cut into individual sheets and then placed in the lavatories?
choice of software...
You're new here?
It is funny that the 2nd most scrobbled artist is "The Beatles" but the do not have any of their songs :(
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Hardly. 'English', 'Scottish', and even 'Irish' people are all really Welsh; they're just too embarrassed to admit it. Something about the silly place names...
And those poor Welsh souls are really wannabe Cornish!
SSC
If they can't appreciate Sonic Youth I don't want to know them.
>>>Last.fm is definitely a way to feel awkward with friends. Some of my acquaintances are well-read, well-dressed, well-spoken people, the sort who really seem to have it all together, but then you can never really manage the same level of respect for them after you've seen their Last.fm profile is nothing but Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga.
>>>
That's because (1) a lot of the so-called "better" music that people have recommended to me is actually boring shit, and (2) I'm not looking for boredom, put-me-to-sleep music. I'm looking for fun music. Lady Gaga is weird but fun. (3) Being familiar with music from hotties like Timberlake and Daughtry makes you popular with the ladies. Saying, "Those guys are crap" is only going to get you dumped
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Duh. Sounds like they discovered caching. Definitely not a new idea.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
>Being familiar with music from hotties like Timberlake and Daughtry makes you popular with the ladies
Call me picky but I wouldn't be interested in a woman that liked that sort of music.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I'm cool with 3 bucks a month. I'm not cool with having to link my credit card to a single password held by a third party in another country. I'm particularly not cool when that third party includes among their terms that I revoke all rights to dispute with my card issuer charges that they make. I'm not at all cool with it when, as far as I can tell from the web, people regularly claim being defrauded from using their service, and wind up having little recourse.
So, no, in terms of risk, I'd be paying far more than $3 a month.
No, I did not.
I don't care if she likes the music, but I certainly wouldn't be interested in a woman petty enough to dump someone because they dislike her favorite musician.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
at least my friends wait until they're really drunk before they break out the Toby Keith.
Who?
>>>This marks them out to the rest of us as being a bit mindless, easily led etc.
I've found that those who listen to "alternative" music have the same flaws, but are merely following a different type of peer pressure (the pressure to listen to non-popular music).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
in perpetual denial of the true fount of all civilization and culture in the british isles: the isle of man
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Only if you're a republican; plenty of northern irish identify themselves as "british".
So why is the name of the country the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? That name does suggest that Northern Ireland isn't part of Great Britain.
Not trolling, just curious.
Don't judge them too harshly. Unless you went to school for music, or otherwise spent some quality time cultivating an appreciation for the organization of sound, you probably don't have any taste. Music seems to be the last area where anyone bothers to develop taste nowadays.
In this age when everyone is concerned with breaking down the barriers and bucking elitism, maybe listening to pop trash makes your well-heeled friends feel folksy and good about themselves.
I did go to school for music, and did play professionally for about a decade before I went in to IT/software, and I'm pretty confident when I observe that, for most people, the words are the music. They don't hear pitches, just lyrics.
If the unschooled person hears something more than the lyrics, it's usually only the highest and lowest pitches at any given moment (the relationship between the bass and melody). All that western harmony in the middle spectrum is really lost on them. That's what my music cognition friends have to say about it, anyway.
The Wiki article would translate to what you said. But there is another view that needs to be thought about. That is "how it is connected?".
ROM and RAM are normally connected directly to address and data buses of CPU and thought today more as memory. The disk are normally connected though an interface (some times another computer/controller) and thought as storage. This all about the PHYSICAL connection. It is also why other connections to "disks" can be created like RAM disks, iSCSI and tape-drive-disks.
I work on a machine that OS "looks" to machine via LOGICAL view. So the disk is just one large slow virtual memory space and the RAM is just faster / closer cache of that virtual space, and cache is faster still and closer. Makes nice to add new drives since it just one big flat model. It even makes journals easy since you can have it stripe the journals over 100 drives with single option. My "current" machine is 32 processors, 640GB of memory, and 900+ disks in RAID5 clusters for 35TB of storage.
1) There is better music and it is actually better. You're just not used to it because it's not getting hammered by the radio 24/7. 2) It's not weird, it's pop. The same pop music that is massively produced for at least the last 20 years. You might like it, I have no problem with that, but it still is just pop music. 3) It makes you popular with ladies that listen to that music only. There are many kinds of ladies with different tastes in music... I am not trying to troll, but that's the way it is
I hope that's an SI unit, else you run the risk of offending the metric nazi's ;)
Naw, that's not offensive.
Try: One Kilo-Libraries of Congress is 1024 Libraries of Congress. Tremble before my usurpation of your precious, precious prefixes!
DATABASE WOW WOW
What? Have you ever listened to the lyrics of "The Hook" by Blues Traveler? They would have a different opinion about it. The melody is the ONLY thing that matters.
Of all the so-called "social" sites whose services I use, Last.fm probably has the best uptime and overall availability. I think I've only seen the main Last.fm site down once or twice in over two years, and I've never seen the Scrobbling service go offline. On top of that, they can actually run a database - unlike Facebook, with its oft-inaccurate or missing data, all of my Last.fm profile is always there. Kudos to these guys for sticking to it and figuring out how to manage high loads properly instead of just whining about how inadequate the tools they have to work with are.
--- Mr. DOS
So which part of the whole setup includes the direct pipe to the various RIAA labels so they can tell them when you're listening to songs you shouldn't be?
That's right. I went there.
They haven't really decided. Rule of thumb, all the U.K. areas except England tend to go by their own name, and England goes by British about 50-50, depending on age, politics, etc. But what do I know? That is just my guess from observing some Wikipedia disputes over this issue.
The "demonym" for the U.K. is "British". That includes Northern Ireland... an awkward situation. Of course, we have "Americans" meaning just the U.S. And back in the olden days, you either called the people of the USSR "Russians" (wrong) or "Soviets" (sort of wrong).
Now all you UKians with you witty humor, just read the funny thread.
Wrong, the U.K. was formed in 1800.
Great Britain's the name of the island comprising England, Scotland and Wales. The UK is all that (and the surrounding smaller islands) plus Northern Ireland. The adjective used to cover all the UK is British. The island of Ireland is geographically part of the British Isles.
I've found that to be less true for people who listen to alternative music, and thus had to actively seek out their music, than those who listen to the music considered mainstream. If the peer-pressure is to listen to non-popular music, I suspect you've confused causation with correlation: people who listen to non-mainstream music seek out different peers to be "pressured" by.
I feel quite comfortable dumping someone for having generally (what I consider) bad taste in music, art, literature etc. Tastes reveal a lot more than you give credit for. (Granted, that's broader than "disliking one's favorite musician.")
I think a lot of people educated in Western music over-emphasize the appreciation of the melodic line and phrase over rhythm. Western art music only caught up with polyrhythms used in other musical traditions in the beginning of the 20th century, and even now, few really do well with microtones. I did have a background in music theory and appreciation (and performance), but it took a course in Hindustani classical music for me to start to realize what I was missing.
Being familiar with music from hotties like Timberlake and Daughtry makes you popular with the ladies. Saying, "Those guys are crap" is only going to get you dumped
By "ladies" you of course mean: girls under 18, or fat old women who wear Betty Boop/Disney pajamas and form Twilight fan clubs.
Me and my girlfriend spent many a night bonding over Slayer and Mike Patton, which suited me just fine. I'd actually be very frightened if she listened to Justin Timberlake (and whoever "Daughtery" is), since there is something very strange about a 30 year old listening to 2000's teeny-bopper music. People shouldn't be frightened of growing up.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
If the unschooled person hears something more than the lyrics, it's usually only the highest and lowest pitches at any given moment (the relationship between the bass and melody). All that western harmony in the middle spectrum is really lost on them. That's what my music cognition friends have to say about it, anyway.
I wouldn't considered myself really "schooled" in music. I played an instrument for 8 years during my pre-college days, but it was nothing special.
But I'm in the exact opposite, I listen to the music's melody and harmony and almost ignore the lyrics entirely. I admit that I don't have the grasp of the complexity as someone truly schooled in music, but I don't listen to the lyrics much save for a few singers.
Heck, I used to laugh at myself because there were a few rap songs with decent music that I liked as a kid and I never even bothered knowing the words. Yet someone else will say "but the lyrics are the whole point of a rap."
Oh well.
You know, I was right there with you knocking Lady GaGa, but there's really more to her than she lets on...
http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=2737
Here she is pre-fame performing at a NYU talent show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM51qOpwcIM
And a Metafilter comment that expresses what I want to say very well: http://www.metafilter.com/86769/Norah-Jones-Look-Out#2827870
I considered Lady Gaga a guilty pleasure until this last video came out. I think it epitomizes all of her potential as a star and artist. All of it, down to the intentionally cheesy Europop backing, is commentary. And all of it is a mask, revealing practically nothing about the person at the helm. That's a really difficult feat to pull off, because stars tend to be insecure enough to want to be liked and respected as an icon but also as a person.
Gaga is basically trying to keep up the illusion that there is no person under there, or at least not what we are used to thinking of as a person. There is something trans-human about her ambition that I think is perfectly timely. She's a smart person having a lark, taking it a million times farther than anyone in their right mind would attempt, and making other pop stars look like the fools and relics that they actually are. I'm surprised more people don't get or appreciate that.
posted by hermitosis at 6:41 AM on November 18 [132 favorites ]
With you on that, it's very rare the lyrics get me, I'm more of a rhythm and timbre man myself... which accounts for my liking hip-hop and death metal amongst other things lol :)
Since I have seen more examples of her signing without autotune in other videos and signing without autotune WHILE playing piano in the linked video, I have even more respect. Sure she does some crazy shit for attention but I bet she is making a killing doing so and will have no problem dropping into some more respectable "professional" musician roles (use her given name to get rid of the "lady gaga" factor) when her act starts to lose its draw.
Bottles.
I was interested to find out a couple of years ago that I had a current and active last.fm account. Turns out that my original audioscrobbler plugin on one of my computers was still alive and kicking and sent updates to the same servers (prefs/plugin were in App Data or something and got copied over with every reformat)
Bottles.
People from the UK tend to think of themselves as Scottish, Welsh, Irish or English, and as they have a history of fighting each other bloodily it's bad form to confuse them. Northern and southern English is an oft made distinction also, the north is generally thought of as working class, and the south the management classes.
The UK is used mainly as a container name by everyone on the outside. So ideally you should find out which country someone comes from come from, and call them by that ( the cultures are quite different ). For me, I don't mind being called British, but I'd rather be called English.
Yeah, but the whole Gaga schtick, she's playing a character. She's rubbing all of our faces in it, too.
The way I think about it: Kurt Cobain killed himself because he was completely distraught over how his music was distributed and digested. He wrote songs about cliques and fads and how shallow and empty and stupid they are... just so see those same cliques he was mocking empty-headedly became his fans and turned his band into a fad, a trend.
He was aiming for the audience, but it sailed right over their heads. He couldn't deal with that.
GaGa, on the other hand, is aiming over their heads. When it sails right on by, she smirks to herself and collects her paycheck. She has a whole lifetime ahead of her for other projects and I seriously, seriously doubt that she's at all married to the GaGa image. Once it runs its course, I'm sure she'll move on to something else.
A serf.
... or they could have just filled each 1u server with 8-16 GB of ram and run 1-8 memcached daemons on each cheaper than ssd, same result.
How does your suggested setup using memcache get around the problem of storing/fetching objects greater than 1MB? That is, without implementing custom interfaces for handling multiple chunks.
From the memcache wiki page:
http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/WhyNotMemcached
"Memcached is terrific! But not for every situation...
You have objects larger than 1MB.
Memcached is not for large media and streaming huge blobs.
"
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.