I’m a big fan of Last.fm – a social networking site that allows you to stream audio and share your music interests with others.

You may have noticed the inclusion of my recently listened to tracks on the bottom right side of this screen:

One of the major benefits to LastFM is it’s API – instead of being tied down to using only the LastFM player to ‘scrobble, I can use pretty much any open-source audio player I want  – and still share my recent tracklist with others. (Googling “pandora API” reveals that as of a few months ago,  Pandora has yet to release an API)

The open API has allowed a number of really nice applications to be developed – you can AudioScrobble from an IPhone, a BlackBerry, graph your listened-to artists history, etc, etc…

Personally, my most commonly used item is one of the most minimal: an MPlayer CLI wrapper used in conjunction with LastFMSubmitD. This allows me to run my player behind a screen and ‘scrobble at the same time. (And running the player behind a screen gives me the freedom to bounce in and out of X)

Over the years, I’ve been slowly working on digitizing all of my audio library. Initially, I was doing the process using only LAME (especially since I generally prefer a command-line tool for most things), however not having anything to add the ID tags to tracks, I finally migrated to using GRip.

Grip allows you to set whatever format string for filenames you want, handles the CDDB lookups and automates ID3 tagging. I generally don’t use the audio player, but it’s there also.

My overall goal is to install an outdoor speaker system in the next few weeks and have my WebpadDT streaming my entire audio library over the wireless from a control point in the kitchen.  The Webpad is ready, the library is 1/3 ripped, now it’s time to find some good speakers.