beta last.fm and more

Alright, I'm a last.fm junkie, I like looking at stats, wandering tech forums, digging for easter eggs and extensions, and hopping on the endless 'similar artists' links and read whatever catches my fancy--works for me like wikipedia for some wikiholics, and sucks time like a black hole, xD.

So I installed the beta client yesterday--it's supposed to work just as slick, with improved tagging and some other goodies, but unfortunately it and my Mediamonkey don't seem to go along this time (I emailed and last.fm staff is already investigating), so MM users, don't rush in to test the new water yet. I now have to resort to listen to the rarely utilized radio stations in the client (out of reluctance to let my tracks go unscrobbled...yeah I'm this hooked), and which, delightfully, turned out to be very good! It streams quite smooth (with my not-so-broad broadband service) and the audio quality isn't bad at all. Totally loving it now.

As for tricks, statistic lovers are gonna love this: Extended last.fm stats based on weekly artist charts. Just enter the username and any specified time period, and it will generate a very comprehensive and rather impressive sheet of stats, like this. Sweet eh? =D

Another find is this Open Minded Index Generator--it calculates the so-named OMI by looking at the user's own tags in relation to the top artists of the last 12 months. Even as a lazy and sporadic tagger, I think the work is pretty nice (not that I got a very high score lol). Try and see for yourself. ;)

For the old tricks, see here.