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.

Comments

Re:No thanks, last.fm

[xtracto]

I do use Last.fm, unfortunately they do not have a wide range of artists, at least not of my liked genre.

Every time I start a station with say the "Satriani" artist tag, I get the exact same 20 songs (in random order), before something completely unrelated start playing. I have the same results with "Kamelot", "Stratovarius" and "Dream Theater".

I liked it more when you could specify two or three artists. That would give you a bit of more breadth on the pool of music to listen.

Regarding alternatives, I have tried Musicology and it is OK, the only drawback being the "web2.0" interface which I really hate.

BTW, the LastRipper program is a good way to save Last.FM streams. I have got a lot of classical music (at 128kbps quality is good for portable players)