I’ve started using Last.fm for music. It seems like a great service, with recommendations like Pandora. The difference is that Last.fm uses other people’s tastes instead of Pandora’s “music genome.” To make the best of the service, it seems, I should always be hooked into Last.fm when I’m listening to music.
At home, it’s easy: they have an iTunes plugin that pings the servers whenever I listen to a song. It will even update with what I listened to on my iPod while I’m away. At work, things are more difficult, since I run Linux and can’t use iTunes. I can listen to recommendations and such with either the Last.fm client or the flash player they have integrated into the site, but I haven’t figured out what to do if I want to listen to my own music.
The problem is compounded by my desire to track when I listen to particular tracks. My iPod is too small to hold all of my music so I’ve set up a somewhat complicated array of playlists to load music based on my ratings, the last time a song was played and whether a song has recently been added to my library. Again, anything I listen to on the iPod gets updated when I plug it into the computer, but anything I play on my machine at work is completely ignored.
What it comes down to is this: I want a way to listen to my iTunes library when I’m not at home. Now that I have an iMac at home (and can carry my PowerBook around with me) this would be solved by either 1) synchronizing iTunes between the PowerBook and the iMac or 2) being able to listen to my main iTunes library remotely (over the internet).
Got any [suggestions][3]?
[3]: mailto:rain@xidus.net?subject=Remote iTunes