This blog was a term-long project wherein I was to interact with a recommender system and document my analysis of its working. I chose last.fm, and over the past few months, I have tried my best to analyze every aspect of this system.
Before I present a summary of my findings, I would like to thanks Dr. W for providing us with this opportunity to work with and learn from these recommender systems. A special thanks to Remi and her analysis of Pandora, which has on many occasions, proven to be the guiding light in directing me in analyzing last.fm. And to Lucia, a member of the Pandora team whose comments have provided wonderful insight into the world of recommendation systems, especially in the domain of music.
My analysis of last.fm began on an exploratory note. Unlike Pandora which I use on a daily basis, last.fm was totally new to me. I spent the first few weeks trying to get a grip on the countless number of features last.fm has.
So what is last.fm? It’s a music recommendation system, which uses a collaborative approach to recommending artists. The music of these artists is recommended on the user-profile radio station. Last.fm learns of your preferences based on the music you listen to on a daily basis (collecting info from you music players) and on the friends you make on last.fm. Eventually, the system learns your preferences, and correlates that to the hit-charts to find the most popular music that match the user’s preferences.
Now I summarize my analysis by listing my finding for 3 different aspects of the system:
1. User Interface: the first thing that you see and that makes you like or hate a system is the user interface. Last.fm does a poor job in this department. Too many options and too many screens showing the same data, a first time user will tear his hair out trying to work his way through the maze of options to get to his recommendations.
The premise of this system is to provide an effective social networking tool that brings people of like minded musical preferences together. But the system’s bread and butter is its music recommending system, Audioscrobbler. If you hide your main functionality behind a veil of other features, sooner or later, people will move away to less complicated systems.
I guess in this department, Pandora wins hands down as having the best GUI for a music recommender system.
2. Recommendations: based on all my interactions, I have come to the conclusion that last.fm gives more preference to the popularity of music, than to its correlation to a user’s tastes. Popularity of an artist dictates if it recommended to a particular user or not, even though that artist might be less correlated to the user’s tastes when compared to some other non-popular artists.
This means good news for those who are in tune with the current trends in music, and who dig the latest developments in field of music. But what if I am looking for my favorite artists of tracks, which are not in the top 100 list? This question was partly responsible for my frustration with last.fm, about which I have blogged numerous times.
Another aspect of recommendations is the number of times it changes. If I like an artist, I should have a say in how long that artist is allowed to stay in my recommendation list. With popularity deciding the recommendation content, no matter what ratings the user gives to an artist, his appearance on the recommendation list will be solely dictated by how popular he is. This means the recommendation list fluctuates very frequently, making it very frustrating to see new music in your profile every time you login!!!!
3. Scrobbling: Scrobbling is the process by which audioscrobbler can listen in on the music you are playing on your local mp3 player on your desktop, or your iPod. For some reason, scrobbling never worked for me. No matter what kind of music I would listen to on my scobble-enabled winamp, it would have no effect on my recommendation list. I had to resort to listening music on the last.fm web player.
Last.fm has an underlying theme of social networking, which might explain the ton of features available on their webpage. But sorting their UI would help attract more music lovers to their site, who are just looking to listen to some good personalized music!!! Last.fm pushes a lot of new artists to the forefront, which helps users to explore a lot of new music. But this same explorative approach can sometimes be very irritating, having to listen to music you REALLLYYY don’t like.
I have played with last.fm long enough to know this – if u spend enough time on last.fm, you can get it to understand your tastes. Even though you might get new recommendations every week, they will at least align with your tastes.
If given a choice, I would go for Pandora any day because of its ease of use. But last.fm gives an innovative and fresh perspective to finding new music on the world wide web. So if you are looking to explore new musical avenues, and want to learn more from the popular tastes of today, and don’t mind a few rotten recommendations in your path to listening bliss, last.fm is the place for you.
I would like to end this post and this blog with the following: given enough time, any system can recommend the right kind of music. The system that does this in the shortest period of time with the least amount of effort from the user side, wins the race to become the ultimate music recommender. And in my books, Pandora sits at this sweet spot, and looks like last.fm has a long way to go before it can beat Pandora at its game.
On that note, I sign off. Hope you all find that perfect recommender system. Happy Searching and Happy listening !!!
Links:
1. my last.fm profile
2. excel sheet documenting my listening sessions
3. Remi's Pandora Blog !!!!
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
found the key!!!
Analysis Excel Sheet
Ok finally some good news!!! Well it’s been ages now since I have been trying to tune last.fm to recognize my preferences, and it has disappointed me a lot. But off-late, I have seen remarkable improvement in the recommendations. Especially the artists who have popped up in the last few days have been phenomenally awesome!!! At one stage I had Saliva, Fort Minor, Mark Shinoda, Linkin Park, and some other awesome artists listed in my recommendation pool.
I think I can safely conclude now that there are 2 factors that drive the ‘goodness’ behind the last.fm recommendations. Firstly, the music you choose and rate should be compatible with current ‘popularity charts’, which are in turn derived from what other users have been listening to recently. Secondly, having the right neighborhood of people and groups of music lovers associated to your profile, who in turn influence how the popularity charts are over-layed on your preferences to make recommendations for you.
The songs that have been playing recently are very popular, because I have heard them on the radio a lot too. And I have rated a few of them to be good on my last.fm profile. This in turn dragged more artists and music of similar kind from the top of the charts into my recommendation list.
Recently a lot of my neighbors have been listening to artists who have been more or less close to my preference. Also the variations in their tastes have been few and far, keeping the threshold of variation in my recommendation pool to a minimum. This predictably makes my recommendations a lot more similar to what they have been in the past few weeks.
Running short of time here, so to conclude I would say that surrounding with good people and rating artists who matter most in the rating charts actually helps in fin-tuning my recommendations.
A final look at my analysis is necessary and I will do this in the coming few weeks. For now, I think I have found the secret key to unlock the potential of last.fm!!!
Ok finally some good news!!! Well it’s been ages now since I have been trying to tune last.fm to recognize my preferences, and it has disappointed me a lot. But off-late, I have seen remarkable improvement in the recommendations. Especially the artists who have popped up in the last few days have been phenomenally awesome!!! At one stage I had Saliva, Fort Minor, Mark Shinoda, Linkin Park, and some other awesome artists listed in my recommendation pool.
I think I can safely conclude now that there are 2 factors that drive the ‘goodness’ behind the last.fm recommendations. Firstly, the music you choose and rate should be compatible with current ‘popularity charts’, which are in turn derived from what other users have been listening to recently. Secondly, having the right neighborhood of people and groups of music lovers associated to your profile, who in turn influence how the popularity charts are over-layed on your preferences to make recommendations for you.
The songs that have been playing recently are very popular, because I have heard them on the radio a lot too. And I have rated a few of them to be good on my last.fm profile. This in turn dragged more artists and music of similar kind from the top of the charts into my recommendation list.
Recently a lot of my neighbors have been listening to artists who have been more or less close to my preference. Also the variations in their tastes have been few and far, keeping the threshold of variation in my recommendation pool to a minimum. This predictably makes my recommendations a lot more similar to what they have been in the past few weeks.
Running short of time here, so to conclude I would say that surrounding with good people and rating artists who matter most in the rating charts actually helps in fin-tuning my recommendations.
A final look at my analysis is necessary and I will do this in the coming few weeks. For now, I think I have found the secret key to unlock the potential of last.fm!!!
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Analysis for Mar 28 - April 03
This is my third week listening and documenting last.fm recommendations. I am still facing the same problems of loosing all my recommendations at the end of every week and having to work the whole week to regain my preferences and straighten out my station to suit my preferences. I am tired of reworking the whole system … done it 3 times already!!! :(
I think I can safely conclude that basing recommendations on artists is not a very bright thing to do. In a social setting, where people recommend music to one another, maybe this makes sense, as people tend to talk more about an artist than a particular song. But I would personally like to listen to some good music than patronize my favorite artist by listening to all their music.
Last.fm could definitely improve their user rating system. When I say ‘don’t play a track’, the system should understand that I don’t want to listen to that type of music or artist, especially if I carry out this action multiple times over the same dataset. Last.fm does not seem to learn from its user actions, and the only way to refine ones recommendations is by deleting artists from the recommended artists list.
In my personal opinion, last.fm is all about pushing new music and artists to the end-users play list. This explorative nature of the recommendations can be really frustrating sometimes, as you expect certain consistency in your recommendations. I am not in the mood for new music everyday. Some days I just want to listen to my good-ol favorites and not worry about rating bad music and artist.
Taking a page out of Remi’s Pandora blog, I have contacted last.fm developers on their blog asking them to help me better analyze/understand last.fm recommendations. No replies yet. Wish there was a ‘Lucia’ in the last.fm team too ;)
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Last.fm VS. Pandora
I have been really nice and neutral in my comments to date, but I guess its time I document my frustrations.
Before I begin my rant, I would like to reiterate that I am a big fan of Pandora. I use Pandora at work, at home, and wherever whenever I need to listen to some new music. Hence I instinctively compare last.fm to Pandora. And I am sorry to say, last.fm comes a distant second in this race to recommend better music.
Last.fm might have started off as small start up venture with some computer geeks working from a school computer lab. But now it has enough venture capital and corporate sponsorship to rival almost all the big online music radio station out there. So there is no excuse for not polishing their efforts to be at par with the best, if not exceeding them. At least when it comes to basic things like user interface design and consistency of service, one would think that last.fm would try to do its best to serve its huge fan base well.
Where should I begin!?!?! For starters, let’s take the UI. Last.fm can recommend music to you in 2 different ways, one through their radio station on their website (‘play recommendation’ option in the user profile) and the other is through the last.fm client software which you can download and install on your local machine. One would expect these 2 interfaces to have the same look and feel, or at least the same option. On the contrary, there are some option/buttons exclusive to the last.fm client. Does this mean the client is a better option than the online station? Definitely not!!! The client frequently runs out of recommendations, displaying the error message ‘not enough content to play’.
If you think this is weird, wait till you see the online interface. Now the best way to do things would be to have a single radio station UI, and then have the option of selecting what you want to play. But last.fm has so many options, I feel completely lost! And to add this confusion, these options are scattered all over the place. On one page you can play the tracks your neighborhood friends are listening to, or you can play the tracks last.fm recommends for you. On another page, you can create a radio station based on an artist of your choice. Why not combine them all into one single cohesive interface with drop down options???!!! Oh and I forgot to mention, you can also play music tagged with a specific text label, in another page of course.
Now coming to recommendations. Does last.fm seriously consider any of the user feedback? I spend the whole week refining my artist preferences, and at the end of the week, my artist recommendations page shows a whole new bunch of artists. What happened to the list of artist that you showed me last week? Will any of those artists be carried on to the lists for the next week? I just spent a whole week working to get my recommendations straight on with my preferences, and you just wipe all that out and ask me to start off with a new bunch of choices?? I mean CMON &#^!~@%#%^!@#!!!!!
Now coming to Pandora, though its internal working might be totally different from that of last.fm (content based recommendations), Pandora does an excellent job at providing a usable and useful UI. Thumbs up/down to rate, select track/artist to start a new station, and not to mention the extremely useful info displayed with every recommendation, that briefly states the reason why that artist/song is playing on my station.
Pandora might not have all the social networking features that last.fm provides, but then again all this is about listening to some good music. Yes I would love to socialize with people who have music tastes similar to mine, but that’s just one of things I would like to do to get more likable music into my jukebox. And if last.fm cannot do that effectively and without causing a headache, I would rather prefer tuning into the local radio station of my choice!
At the end of the day, it is unfair to compare Pandora with last.fm, last.fm is trying to create a social networking space for music lovers, and Pandora is trying to create a jukebox of your favorite music based on analysis of musical attributes. Having a panel of music experts recommend music to you (pandora) and having your friends choose your music are 2 very different things. But that’s no excuse to not provide a functional piece of software!
Sorry for being so critical of last.fm, but I have had a tough time trying to get what I want from last.fm I wish things were much simpler. But that’s just me.
I haven’t explored last.fm to its full potential yet, and I hope in the future things improve.
Links: Excel sheet sumamrizing last.fm analysis
Before I begin my rant, I would like to reiterate that I am a big fan of Pandora. I use Pandora at work, at home, and wherever whenever I need to listen to some new music. Hence I instinctively compare last.fm to Pandora. And I am sorry to say, last.fm comes a distant second in this race to recommend better music.
Last.fm might have started off as small start up venture with some computer geeks working from a school computer lab. But now it has enough venture capital and corporate sponsorship to rival almost all the big online music radio station out there. So there is no excuse for not polishing their efforts to be at par with the best, if not exceeding them. At least when it comes to basic things like user interface design and consistency of service, one would think that last.fm would try to do its best to serve its huge fan base well.
Where should I begin!?!?! For starters, let’s take the UI. Last.fm can recommend music to you in 2 different ways, one through their radio station on their website (‘play recommendation’ option in the user profile) and the other is through the last.fm client software which you can download and install on your local machine. One would expect these 2 interfaces to have the same look and feel, or at least the same option. On the contrary, there are some option/buttons exclusive to the last.fm client. Does this mean the client is a better option than the online station? Definitely not!!! The client frequently runs out of recommendations, displaying the error message ‘not enough content to play’.
If you think this is weird, wait till you see the online interface. Now the best way to do things would be to have a single radio station UI, and then have the option of selecting what you want to play. But last.fm has so many options, I feel completely lost! And to add this confusion, these options are scattered all over the place. On one page you can play the tracks your neighborhood friends are listening to, or you can play the tracks last.fm recommends for you. On another page, you can create a radio station based on an artist of your choice. Why not combine them all into one single cohesive interface with drop down options???!!! Oh and I forgot to mention, you can also play music tagged with a specific text label, in another page of course.
Now coming to recommendations. Does last.fm seriously consider any of the user feedback? I spend the whole week refining my artist preferences, and at the end of the week, my artist recommendations page shows a whole new bunch of artists. What happened to the list of artist that you showed me last week? Will any of those artists be carried on to the lists for the next week? I just spent a whole week working to get my recommendations straight on with my preferences, and you just wipe all that out and ask me to start off with a new bunch of choices?? I mean CMON &#^!~@%#%^!@#!!!!!
Now coming to Pandora, though its internal working might be totally different from that of last.fm (content based recommendations), Pandora does an excellent job at providing a usable and useful UI. Thumbs up/down to rate, select track/artist to start a new station, and not to mention the extremely useful info displayed with every recommendation, that briefly states the reason why that artist/song is playing on my station.
Pandora might not have all the social networking features that last.fm provides, but then again all this is about listening to some good music. Yes I would love to socialize with people who have music tastes similar to mine, but that’s just one of things I would like to do to get more likable music into my jukebox. And if last.fm cannot do that effectively and without causing a headache, I would rather prefer tuning into the local radio station of my choice!
At the end of the day, it is unfair to compare Pandora with last.fm, last.fm is trying to create a social networking space for music lovers, and Pandora is trying to create a jukebox of your favorite music based on analysis of musical attributes. Having a panel of music experts recommend music to you (pandora) and having your friends choose your music are 2 very different things. But that’s no excuse to not provide a functional piece of software!
Sorry for being so critical of last.fm, but I have had a tough time trying to get what I want from last.fm I wish things were much simpler. But that’s just me.
I haven’t explored last.fm to its full potential yet, and I hope in the future things improve.
Links: Excel sheet sumamrizing last.fm analysis
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Analysis for Mar 20 - Mar 27
This week, i carried on with my listening sessions, documenting the recommended artists, songs and my mood during the session. for the first time in all the sessions i have had to date, last.fm finally understood what i was looking for. or maybe it was just a coincidence. but this session was definitely better than all my other sessions. also the artist recommendations are getting really awesome now.
i would love to have a resident cognitive scientist help me understand the relation between my listening mood and ratings, but i guess that's asking for too much !!! you are welcome to download my excel spreadsheet file and do some analysis yourself. just dont forget to share your results with me !
A summary of my findings to date:
1. Songs played are directly related to the artists who are in the recommended list.
2. If an artist is removed from the recommended list, his songs no longer play as recommendations.
3. The song play list does NOT deviate from the artist recommendation list.
4. A track is scrobbled only after you listen to it for a few minutes/seconds.
5. Mood plays a big role in music choices.
6. Audioscrobbler generates recommendations on a weekly basis, which I think is influenced by the listening habits of my 'neighbors' and of course, myself. The popularity of an artist or track helps it to climb or fall in the recommendations list.
7. Audioscrobbler recommends audio tracks, albums, artists, events (concerts), videos and even users (neighbors).
8. I have a list of neighbors, who are people who listen to music similar to what I have been listening to ... last.fm calls them recommended users.
9. The list of artists which you may see on an artist page as being "similar" is based exactly on our user's listening habits. If a lot of users listen to Artist X, but also Artist Y and Z - Y and Z artists will become similar to X.
10. The recommendations are classified based on where they have been derived from (group recommendations, friend recommendations, and last.fm recommendations).
11. All the recommendations are tied up by Audioscrobbler to my listening preferences, but the recommendations vary very widely depending on the sources.
12. Recommendations from friends reflect their taste and I found most of these recommendations to be far from what I was looking for. But this is a social networking based technology, and listening to other people sometimes does open up interesting choices.
13. Neighborhood of friends!!! Yes we can actually see all the people who are listening to music that u have in your profile. This neighborhood helps to showcase 2 things:
a. Popularity of the music you are listening to.
b. Potential friends who you can add to your list.
14. There is also a recommendation list for albums and concerts and other music related events.
15. If the track length is less than 30 seconds, last.fm radio player refuses to scrobble the track.
Links:
Excel file documenting my listening sessions: http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=842019c33f4638ee67c62c4eb54b10d1
i would love to have a resident cognitive scientist help me understand the relation between my listening mood and ratings, but i guess that's asking for too much !!! you are welcome to download my excel spreadsheet file and do some analysis yourself. just dont forget to share your results with me !
A summary of my findings to date:
1. Songs played are directly related to the artists who are in the recommended list.
2. If an artist is removed from the recommended list, his songs no longer play as recommendations.
3. The song play list does NOT deviate from the artist recommendation list.
4. A track is scrobbled only after you listen to it for a few minutes/seconds.
5. Mood plays a big role in music choices.
6. Audioscrobbler generates recommendations on a weekly basis, which I think is influenced by the listening habits of my 'neighbors' and of course, myself. The popularity of an artist or track helps it to climb or fall in the recommendations list.
7. Audioscrobbler recommends audio tracks, albums, artists, events (concerts), videos and even users (neighbors).
8. I have a list of neighbors, who are people who listen to music similar to what I have been listening to ... last.fm calls them recommended users.
9. The list of artists which you may see on an artist page as being "similar" is based exactly on our user's listening habits. If a lot of users listen to Artist X, but also Artist Y and Z - Y and Z artists will become similar to X.
10. The recommendations are classified based on where they have been derived from (group recommendations, friend recommendations, and last.fm recommendations).
11. All the recommendations are tied up by Audioscrobbler to my listening preferences, but the recommendations vary very widely depending on the sources.
12. Recommendations from friends reflect their taste and I found most of these recommendations to be far from what I was looking for. But this is a social networking based technology, and listening to other people sometimes does open up interesting choices.
13. Neighborhood of friends!!! Yes we can actually see all the people who are listening to music that u have in your profile. This neighborhood helps to showcase 2 things:
a. Popularity of the music you are listening to.
b. Potential friends who you can add to your list.
14. There is also a recommendation list for albums and concerts and other music related events.
15. If the track length is less than 30 seconds, last.fm radio player refuses to scrobble the track.
Links:
Excel file documenting my listening sessions: http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=842019c33f4638ee67c62c4eb54b10d1
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Analysis for Mar 01 - Mar 19
After random and prolonged sessions of feeding my preferences into last.fm, it is finally time to document the recommendations last.fm throws at me. i am maintaining a excel sheet of all the recommendations, including the weekly recommendations of artists.
my first documented session was on March 17. i started off the session by documenting all the artists. then i let last.fm do its thing by letting it 'play my recommendations'.
Observations:
1. songs played are directly related to the artists who are in the recommended list.
2. if a artist is removed from the recommeded list, his songs no longer play as recommendations.
3. the song playlist does NOT deviate from the artist recommendation list
my first session threw up some pretty bad artist and songs. after removing some of these artist from the list, the song list deviated towards some really decent tracks. some of these tracks were infact ones i have heard before and are my all tiem favorites, and some were new tracks which were suprizingly awesome too!!!
but we all know music makers are not a predictable bunch of ppl. no matter how good an artist is, he or she or they always do release some music which might not fit on your scale of 'good' music. I love audioslave, and i love all thier songs, each and everyone of them. but some audioslave tracks are a lil too slow or grungy for me. you can attribute this to the fact that sometimes, listening to a artist perform a particular type of music programs your mind expect a certain tone, pitch and idealogy from that artist. any deviation by the artist from his original music style will put a lot of people off. because at the end of the day, we appreciate music, not the artist's ability in coming up with a totally radical piece of music, especially if you dont like that style of music. i would stop listening to audioslave if they were to get into country music ... for sure i would .. most Definately i would.
i know the statements above sound crude and judgemental, and i do not mean to generalize my views to all the music loving people of planet earth, but i have seen this happen one times too many. metallica, slipknot, ratm, chris connel. some ppl like eminem seem to pull off this transition with ease, going from rapping about issues plaguing our society and its understucture, to singing about money mercedes and fame.
moods. i know i have already documented thiis in one of my earlier posts, but when i started documenting my recommendations, i realized the critical role mood plays in shaping my recommendations. so i decided to document my mood too !!!
going back to my excel sheet, in my first session i ended up banning a lot of stations from my playlist. i also removed a lot of artists from my list. the second session proved to be a little better, with some decent tracks showing up in my list. by the third session i had a pretty good set of artists and songs being churned out from my last.fm radio.
i plan to now wait for a week before starting off another spate of listening sessions. hopefully i can determine some pattern in my tastes.
i will also talk more about pandora and how i believe music recommendation engines work towards satisfying listeners in my next post.
Link to my lat.fm recommendation excel sheet:
http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=76ec86040ae994630f5b549db4481c23
my first documented session was on March 17. i started off the session by documenting all the artists. then i let last.fm do its thing by letting it 'play my recommendations'.
Observations:
1. songs played are directly related to the artists who are in the recommended list.
2. if a artist is removed from the recommeded list, his songs no longer play as recommendations.
3. the song playlist does NOT deviate from the artist recommendation list
my first session threw up some pretty bad artist and songs. after removing some of these artist from the list, the song list deviated towards some really decent tracks. some of these tracks were infact ones i have heard before and are my all tiem favorites, and some were new tracks which were suprizingly awesome too!!!
but we all know music makers are not a predictable bunch of ppl. no matter how good an artist is, he or she or they always do release some music which might not fit on your scale of 'good' music. I love audioslave, and i love all thier songs, each and everyone of them. but some audioslave tracks are a lil too slow or grungy for me. you can attribute this to the fact that sometimes, listening to a artist perform a particular type of music programs your mind expect a certain tone, pitch and idealogy from that artist. any deviation by the artist from his original music style will put a lot of people off. because at the end of the day, we appreciate music, not the artist's ability in coming up with a totally radical piece of music, especially if you dont like that style of music. i would stop listening to audioslave if they were to get into country music ... for sure i would .. most Definately i would.
i know the statements above sound crude and judgemental, and i do not mean to generalize my views to all the music loving people of planet earth, but i have seen this happen one times too many. metallica, slipknot, ratm, chris connel. some ppl like eminem seem to pull off this transition with ease, going from rapping about issues plaguing our society and its understucture, to singing about money mercedes and fame.
moods. i know i have already documented thiis in one of my earlier posts, but when i started documenting my recommendations, i realized the critical role mood plays in shaping my recommendations. so i decided to document my mood too !!!
going back to my excel sheet, in my first session i ended up banning a lot of stations from my playlist. i also removed a lot of artists from my list. the second session proved to be a little better, with some decent tracks showing up in my list. by the third session i had a pretty good set of artists and songs being churned out from my last.fm radio.
i plan to now wait for a week before starting off another spate of listening sessions. hopefully i can determine some pattern in my tastes.
i will also talk more about pandora and how i believe music recommendation engines work towards satisfying listeners in my next post.
Link to my lat.fm recommendation excel sheet:
http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=76ec86040ae994630f5b549db4481c23
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Observation: Scrobbling
Back from a looooong break, i started up my last.fm player today looking for some new features to play with. i started off by creating a station with the tag audioslave (artist tag). the track like a stone came on - my favorite.
At the top of the last.fm player are 2 bars which look like a long progress bar. the top one states the current track the player is playing/scrobbling. the bar below talk about the station and the artist/song on which it is based.
A few seconds into the track, i noticed some activity in this top bar. at the same moment the track started playing, a blue progress bar started filling up the bar. a few seconds later the whole bar was blue, and then the words 'scrobbled' were flashed in the corner of the bar.
To sum it up, a track is scrobbled only after you listen to it for a few minutes/seconds. i will time this progress bar and get more info on it later. for now, i know that i have to actually listen to the track for a few seconds before it is scrobbled into my profile.
Update (March 12, 2008):
Link: http://www.last.fm/forum/34905/_/168133
The above link points to the fact that a track has to play for a predetermined amount of time, before it gets scrobbled and registered with the last.fm recommendation engine. though the source of this info cannot be validated, it is reassuring to know that someone else other than me has actually noticed this !!!!
At the top of the last.fm player are 2 bars which look like a long progress bar. the top one states the current track the player is playing/scrobbling. the bar below talk about the station and the artist/song on which it is based.
A few seconds into the track, i noticed some activity in this top bar. at the same moment the track started playing, a blue progress bar started filling up the bar. a few seconds later the whole bar was blue, and then the words 'scrobbled' were flashed in the corner of the bar.
To sum it up, a track is scrobbled only after you listen to it for a few minutes/seconds. i will time this progress bar and get more info on it later. for now, i know that i have to actually listen to the track for a few seconds before it is scrobbled into my profile.
Update (March 12, 2008):
Link: http://www.last.fm/forum/34905/_/168133
The above link points to the fact that a track has to play for a predetermined amount of time, before it gets scrobbled and registered with the last.fm recommendation engine. though the source of this info cannot be validated, it is reassuring to know that someone else other than me has actually noticed this !!!!
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