Last.fm I must leave thee.

I really like last.fm, I like what it keeps track of. That's what I like about it. I don't like it's algo, the math they use to determine what songs you like. Yeah I listened to ICP in the 5th grade...no I don't need every single song I listen to today to be from Psychopathic Records. At one point on my "Reccomended" I could only get comedy because I liked a few comedians tracks, and a lot of nerdcore. ::facepalm::

Do not need.

So I don't care, they keep track of what I'm listening to, that's what I use the service for, and for the create your own station by tag or whatever the option is called. This station only mildly has to do with that tag, which for better or worse is usually better than the radio....wait, not if you live near/in Nashville. We have 91.1...at least for a little while. Losing that station is going to suck.

I digress. So I went to listen on my phone today, to Last.fm and sure enough there's a pay wall for mobile devices now. I did a double take...seriously. I started poking around there website to see what the deal was, and wonderfully enough there is an export in XML format, for your loved tracks.

I took the chance, and indeed Paul Simon was right. I hopped on the Bus Gus. So I grabbed that file. I decided to make it more readable for non geeks, so I did this to put a more readable version in a file called titles:

cat bsdpunk_lovedtracks.xspf |perl -pe "s/.*<title>(.*)<\/title><creator>(.*)<\/creator>.*/Song: \1 Artist: \2/gi"> titles

Yeah yeah I know, don't parse XML with regex, it will anger Chthulu. I still don't know what you are supposed to use to parse it without regex, and even if I did I probably wouldn't use it for this, it took me less than a few minutes to write.

Also does that snippet of code help...no not really. I mean that's to give you something that is human readable to other people, you know...normies, so you have a:

Song: Twenty-Three Artist: MC Lars
Song: Listen Close Artist: MC Frontalot
Song: In Arrears Artist: MC Frontalot
Song: Why So Nerdcore Artist: MC GoblinMajick

What will I ultimately do with this xml file...obviously not this, unless I just wanted to paste it up somewhere like a web page.

I think I actually want to build my own algo. In some way it can be run independently, of pay services that actually provide the music, like last.fm.

How will I do this...I have no idea. It's 4 in the morning, and I have to be at work in a few hours, I just couldn't sleep.

Until then I will use Pandora on my phone( evo shift ). My very awesome phone I am very much in love with(not sarcasm).