*where fun is great utility

*where profit is a rich storehouse of otherwise unsaveable audio tracks



I was supposed to post this about 8 months ago. Anyway, being that Last.fm was recently accused of handed over a load of non-anonymized data to the RIAA, I thought it would be fitting to post this info on basically abusing leveraging Last.fm through a combination of the shell-fm client and a program called tee. This is essentially me linking to someone else's information, but I put it in a few useful contexts. Click through to read the full post.



You should read this if any of the following apply:



you appreciate free music, especially via some cool linux hacks



you want to passively generate a potentially massive music library in mp3 format



to not only listen to, but also simultaneously download great potential mixtape songs that you've never heard before



somewhat random, yet full access to the entire secure last.fm catalogue of mp3s



to become part of a tiny minority of power users leveraging a great service for a novel purpose







About a year ago,



The command follows. There's

extern = tee "/home/noah/sapphires/%a - %t.mp3" | aoss madplay -Q - With this, I generated a gigabyte of music over 3 days of casual listening. Over 300 songs, with many of them among my favorite songs. How else would I get this so easily?



Why would you want this?

You can regenerate a music library from music you've already scrobbled , but might not have access to.

, but might not have access to. You're like me in that when someone asks you to make them a mixtape, you never know what to put on it because your musical taste is so broad. Your Last.fm profile is pretty well fleshed out, so just run shell-fm with this script for as long as you want the mixtape to be, on the library station for your username, and then burn the mp3s to disc.



See above for more reasons.



Where this doesn't work: with filenames that have special characters. Artists who have filenames like GZA/Genius won't get written to disk because it confuses tee. Heard Iron Bug, "They're Coming To Town" . The quotes in the song name also confuse tee. This may be corrected in the



Many of us listen to enormous quantities of music these days. Those of us who are smart and cautious tend to back this music up on external hard drives. Sometimes, multiple redundant hard drives. Some of us are smart, but not cautious. We have plenty of music, but it isn't stored with the worst case scenario in mind. My hard drives crashed in September, right after I moved 500 miles away from home, to live in Columbus, Ohio. Shortly thereafter, I found a hack here that allowed me to re-generate my music library using my last.fm profile data and the last.fm service. No hard work necessary. Listen to music; the collection builds itself.About a year ago, I wrote about shell-fm , a lightweight Last.FM client for Linux. It's still pretty much the best thing going when it comes to console-based Last.FM clients. Being that it's just a little console app, it's a lot less bloated than the official last.fm app. And personally, I think it's better looking.The command follows. There's a far more sophisticated version of this available at the external link now, that actually tags the file as it downloads. I suggest you go and get that one.With this, I generated a gigabyte of music over 3 days of casual listening. Over 300 songs, with many of them among my favorite songs. How else would I get this so easily?Why would you want this?Where this doesn't work: with filenames that have special characters. Artists who have filenames like GZA/Genius won't get written to disk because it confuses tee. tee interprets this as a directory instead of a filename because of the slash. Here's an example of a bad songname:. The quotes in the song name also confuse tee. This may be corrected in the newer version discussed briefly above and linked to throughout this post, but I haven't finished testing it out yet.

Lastly, in light of the Last.fm user data scare, I feel I should mention Libre.fm , an open alternative to Last.fm. It's in the alpha stage of testing and will even import your user data via this scraping utility