On my old blog (check the wayback machine), I posted about a music stats system called foosic. Mostly, I liked that it had a foobar2000 plugin and did a great job of identifying tracks (audio fingerprinting) such that if people all had different tags—which they do—it still keeps the stats in one place and reports the title, artist, genre, etc. as the most used form.
However, almost as long as I had been using foosic, there would be times when it was just down. I emailed some people, and it came back up. Then, earlier this year, the problems became persistent, and then it was gone. So, I figured I’d have to use last.fm (formerly AudioScrobbler, hence the “as” logo). Back when I found foosic, I tried last.fm and hated it. It was slow, I had to use a custom program to submit tracks, and I didn’t really need all of the “social” crap they laud.
Funny thing is, when you only have one choice, it starts looking pretty appealing! Plus, I found foo_audioscrobbler, which completely sidesteps the need for the external program. I still don’t really care about the last.fm community, but band suggestions are nice, and pretty relevant. So, certainly if you are a foobar user and want some external playback stats, last.fm should work for you. And, if you are interested, you can see what I’ve been listening to. I’ll even be your last.fm friend if I know you… isn’t that special?
