I don’t know about you, but I love to listen to music. I listen to music at home, at work, on the train, in the car, and in between. I have a steady playlist of artists I like to listen to: Black Keys, Allman Brothers, Guster, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Will Hoge, and many more. As much as I enjoy those artists, I enjoy finding new music too. This is where the March Software Pick Of The Month comes in.
iScrobbler is a small program that sits in your menubar. The beauty of iScrobbler is the ability to send the music you listen to on your iPod or in iTunes to the Last.fm music service. Last.fm is basically a social network built around music. Even though other social networks have a music presence, music is the focus on Last.fm.
As iScrobbler sends music to your Last.fm profile, Last.fm begins to crunch the data behind those songs and creates a whole host of recommend artists, friends, concerts, neighbours, videos, and more. The more music you “scrobble”, as they call it, the better those recommend items become. What I like about iScrobbler is that it performs the intended function (sending your music to Last.fm) and gets out of the way. It’s a super easy program to use and it performs flawlessly. Using this program I’ve found some great new artists on Last.fm, most notably Sara Bareilles.
iScrobbler sends what you listen to Last.fm just as it should. In addition to music, it also sends your podcasts too. While I don’t care if people see what podcasts I listen to, I’d like to keep Last.fm focused on just my music. Here’s a tip from Rory Parle to stop iScrobbler from sending your podcasts to Last.fm.
- Quit iScrobbler
- Type the following in the terminal: defaults write org.flexistentialist.iscrobbler “Track Filters” ‘(“Podcast”)’
- Start iScrobbler
- Now your podcasts won’t be sent to Last.fm!
iScrobbler is free and can be downloaded from the iScrobbler group forum. If you’re on Last.fm and have a similar taste in music, add me to your friends list.