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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.
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
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)
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.
English, you insensitive clod.
"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."
Last.fm's definition of "hottest" is what people actually listen to. It's not a handful of artist names handed down from MusicMegaCorpCoLLC to be digested by the uninformed masses ;)
I suggest looking at what Last.fm actually is. It has helped me find new music frequently. It also made me spend lots of money, which is the only real drawback. Anything you play is recorded, and musical compatibility with other members is compared to give suggestions. There might not be samples of everything on their site, but I usually find samples somewhere (Spotify is the weakest, iTunes and eMusic usually has it).
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".
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)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I'm not sure if you've really missed the point, or are just trolling (making me an idiot for replying..).
The idea of putting the "most popular" tracks on SSD is to make it more efficient to stream the tracks that are more likely to be requested.
It's optimising the efficient use of their hardware. It doesn't have anything to do with last.fm's suggestions algorithms and does not at all mean last.fm will force these tracks on you.
You're amusingly uninformed considering you're throwing around terms like "sheeple".
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