Feeding the scrobbler

This week, my objective was to setup a account with last.fm and build a user profile by feeding data to the recommender system. I hooked up winamp with the recommendation engine by installing the required plug-in. I then queued close to 500 songs on winamp. While adding songs to the playlist, I made sure I chose songs from similiar genres. But at the same time, I also had to make sure I wasn’t biased towards anyone particular artist. Some of the artists and songs I had on my playlist were:

500 George Thorogood - Move It On Over
499 Bob Dylan - Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
498 Joe Cocker - The Letter
497 Ten Years After - I'd Love To Change The World
496 Kingsmen - Louie Louie
495 Humble Pie - Thirty Days In The Hole
494 Beatles - I Should Have Known Better
493 Bob Seger - Old Time Rock And Roll
492 Santana - Evil Ways
491 Robert Palmer - Addicted To Love
490 Lovin' Spoonful - Summer In The City
489 David Bowie - Rebel Rebel
488 Amboy Dukes - Journey To The Center Of The Mind
487 Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train
486 Sly/Family Stone - Dance To The Music
485 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Suzie Q
484 Warren Zevon - Werewolves of London
483 Eric Clapton - Forever Man 482 Hollies - Bus Stop
481 Sugarloaf - Green-Eyed Lady
480 Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
479 Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
478 Tom Petty - Free Fallin' 2
477 Neil Young - Southern Man
476 Crosby, Stills Nash - Helplessly Hoping
475 Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today
474 Santana - Black Magic Woman
473 Eagles - One Of These Nights
472 Canned Heat - On The Road Again
471 Dr. John - Right Place, Wrong Time

I then let winamp do its thing, and let it play for upto 48 hours on a roll (a song averages 3 minutes, so for 500 tracks the total playtime would be close to 25 hours). Ofcourse, I did have other playlists pumping in music from artists like audio slave, Coldplay, Perl jam, dream theatre, etc.
Note: when I am playing these tracks, I am not able to rate them. So audioscrobbler has no idea as to weather I actually like the tack or not. It assumes that just because I had the track on my playlist and I am playing it, I like it. Also, from my initial observations, it seems audioscrobbler send the name of the song to the last.fm server as soon as I hit the play button (or as it comes up next on the playlist)

Now, I have all this information fed to the recommendation engine. Is it enough to get the recommendations I need? What will be the quality of the recommendations? What other features of last.fm leverages the recommender system funcitonalities? To answer all these questions, I have to wait a while, or atlesat that’s what last.fm says. Lat.fm is calculating my recommendations, and in this time, I am going to feed more music to it!!! I also plan to rate some the tracks I listen to on the last.fm radio player. All this will hopefully give audioscrobbler enough data to make a good set of recommendations for me.