Now that I’ve got all my media players scrobbling to last.fm, I’ve developed a serious case of recently played narcissism. I find myself checking my newly scrobbled tracks page about every 10-15 minutes unless I’m seriously concentrating on something. This constant attention reveals two interesting things.
First, quality digital track metadata makes life in the new music era much improved. I had a bunch of tracks ripped from CDs way back in the 1995-1998 range. Since they were DJ mixed House discs, they were compilations of tracks from various artists. The automated ripping software and catalogs of the time were pretty inconsistent so you might wind up with the ID3 artist being the CD compiler or the original artist. Similarly, the track title might be the original track title, or the title combined with the track artist. And then there was stuff that was just flat out wrong, not to mention confusion about Unicode characters for our favorite foreign artists.
Poor last.fm was having a hard time correctly resolving track names. So I anted up for TuneUp Gold, which I’ll give a provisional endorsement. It actually does ID3 clean-up pretty well, but I’m not a big fan of the user interface, which is a bit sluggish on my machine.
The second thing I learned is that while the world is improving in regards to DJ mixed music in general, and House in particular, things still ain’t perfect. last.fm is pretty good about having entries for most of the major House artists. However, there’s a lot of pseudonyms in the genre along with remixes, edits, “featuring FooBar”, etc. last.fm doesn’t do a great job with this stuff, especially resolving to the right artist. I’ve also seen very limited positive results for auto-correction on these tracks. I’m not sure how good they could do though. I can’t seem to find it anymore, but I remember a page on the last.fm site essentially saying “various artists are hard!” Plus, I’m sure the House listening population is pretty small, so last.fm doesn’t have a lot of useful data.
I’m wondering if there’s room for a niche, self-sustaining, adjunct to last.fm that caters to House fiends. Maybe with a little more people power to compensate for the lack of scale and data on the automation side.
Despite all that, I should say I am quite enjoying last.fm.