July 01, 2008

Review of the Last.fm Open-Source Client for Linux

Last.fm is an open-source application licensed under the GPL, allowing you to listen to Last.fm radio stations and submit the songs in the same time. For those of you unfamiliar with Last.fm, it's a great social music community, allowing you to submit songs you currently listen to, statistics, forums for bands or music styles (or even more: Amarok has a group, most major distributions also, and you can start your own group about anything, match people and discuss), together with information for each artist, open for anyone to edit, just like the Wikipedia style.

The application is also included in Debian's repositories (and probably most other distributions), and it can be downloaded alternately from the Tools page on Last.fm. What I liked is that they also offer an online Debian repository for it here, although I recommend using the official package in Debian's repositories. But if you want the latest version, the repositories they provide are fine.

Main interface after logging in

The client is built using the Qt 4.3.4 libraries since April 2, 2008, so the integration with KDE 4.x should be just fine. You will also need a Last.fm account in order to use it.

Features
The left tab contains most of the important links for the Last.fm radio, like recently played, loved or banned songs, tags, friends, neighbours or history. You can love, ban or skip songs (but unfortunately I couldn't find any 'pause' button). You can also start your own radio station and add favourite songs there.

Listening to radio

It integrates with the system tray, and it's available in several languages, like English, French or Italian.

It also offers several configuration options, like the audio engine or the icon in the system tray.

Configuration

As a conclusion, the Last.fm client can prove very useful for persons who like to listen to internet radio a lot, unless you prefer to do it in your own audio player of choice. Overall, another nice free application for our delight, and these projects should really be encouraged and supported.

Updated: Jul 01, 2008 (Created: Jul 01, 2008)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you tried shell-fm ? I've used shell-fm since I heard about it. Much easier and quicker than the gui programs out there.

http://nex.scrapping.cc/code/shell-fm/

Craciun Dan said...

Not yet, but maybe I'll give it a try now that you mentioned it. Actually I'm not much into listening to radio anyway, I like to scrobble my tracks from the audio collection in Amarok.