last.fm support?

[Wiley_Coyote]

Is there any chance that the HD Theater might eventually support last.fm (particularly in standalone mode)?

To be clear, there are several types of last.fm functionality, and they likely would each have to be implemented separately.

The most obvious one is audio streaming. A last.fm user, over time, builds a profile of music based on their listening habits, and that can be played back as a streaming music channel. last.fm also has other kinds of streaming "channels" you can listen to, for example you can listen to channels based on searching for an artist, and play back music from that artist, as well as other artists who have been categorized as similar. Typically these streams are listenable from last.fms own little player, but the standards seem to be open enough that I've also seen the last.fm stream playback integrated into a lot of music players (as a plugin, sort of like Shoutcast or Pandora).

But last.fm also has another "piece" that's completely different than this. As I said above, each last.fm user gradually builds a profile based on their listening habits. Well, the way that's accomplished is that the vast majority of computer-based music players now support what are called "scrobbling" plugins. These plugins take the metadata from the songs you listen to and submit them to your last.fm profile--helping to build up your history. It would be nice if the HD200 was able to submit scrobbling data, because currently every other non-portable music player I own (and if I really fool around with it maybe even my portable) "scrobbles", so the HD200 is the "odd man out" in that arrangement.

Offhand I know that Winamp, Windows Media Player, Media Monkey, Helium Music Player, Songbird, and Linux's Amarok, Banshee and Exaile players all support scrobbling, and on the handheld front iPods, iPhones, Microsoft Zune, and all of the Rockbox implementations can support a scrobbling synch mode (where it submits the data to last.fm whenever you connect the device to your PC). Probably a lot of other programs and devices have the support--those are just the ones I know for sure about. I've also heard that Microsoft is added Xbox Live support for last.fm later this year (it was announced at this year's E3), so that'll be covered too, although I have no idea if that support will include scrobbling as well as the streaming.

The final piece of last.fm functionality which can be useful is probably the hardest to implement on something like the HD200, so its the one I'd doubt is worth bothering with. But it certainly would be sweet if someday it happened. When these "scrobbles" happen on many music players (Amarok and Songbird both are really good examples of this being used well), after the data is submitted to last.fm, many players pull data BACK from the last.fm servers. Stuff like detailed info on the artist or album, album covers, a pick list of "similar artists" or "similar tracks", descriptive tags which you and other last.fm users have associated with each artist, album or track, which again can lead you to other songs, etc.

While I imagine the last.fm streaming features may already be supported as one of the HD Extenders you have to have the SAGE server-side software for (although I suppose they could also be supported directly on the unit as well), I believe that scrobbling support likely would only be implementable running on the HD 200 unit itself.

[sbherculano]

This idea is really Great, be possible to have Lastfm and others internet radios in standalone mode and in SageTV server too.

I have a NAS with Mediatomb UPnP server and you can configure external links to Internet radio on it, the HD200 can access Mediatomb server but is not able to open the streams (m3u or pls for instance) and play it in standalone mode, even in Extender mode you cannot do that. I can play this strams in WMP or Wimamp but not in SageTV (HD200 or Extender mode)

I know that one colleague from the Forum created a feature called Slimplayer that use Squeezebox and you can play radio streams in Extender mode, but in my opinion this is not a clean solution and the best approach is the HD200 recognize Radio Streams in Standalone mode and the same in SageTV server in a simple way.

Is there any possibility to do this ? Is there any plans to implement it on HD200 and/or SageTV server ?