Wow, I can’t believe I was able to do this.
http://www.kilobitspersecond.com/topalbumart.php?user=
Just tack your last.fm username onto the end of that url to generate the cover art for your most listened-to album of last week. Pretty cool.
Bands and albums with ampersands don’t work at the moment. urlencode() doesn’t seem to do the trick. Any theories?
This will come as a shock to anybody who knows me, but I’ve all but stopped using foobar2000. A couple months ago on the indietorrents forums, somebody mentioned MP3Toys, and I’ve been using it almost exclusively since.
As I mentioned in a previous post, all the chores I was made to do in foobar seemed to keep me from listening to music: I was working for my software, and not vice-versa. My collection of music felt cold and dead and fragile in the hands of foobar, and none of the features I had idealized in my mind were anywhere near fruition (true hotness, similarity-by-mood filters, etc.). I desperately wanted something to get me back in touch with my music, something that delivered music to me in a way that felt as natural as buying a CD and putting it in my stereo. I even considered switching to iTunes.
MP3Toys isn’t for every foobar user; I just got lucky enough that it emulates my ideal behavior in foobar. It’s a living, breathing program, and using it is a humanistic experience. It understands not just that you listen to music, but why you listen to music. Some of its intelligent features include:
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For a long time, last.fm has linked to a purported weekly album chart feed on their web services page. Because I find this much more interesting than the weekly artist and track charts, I was happy to find today that these feeds have finally become active. Just replace “topdownjimmy” with your username in this url:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/topdownjimmy/weeklyalbumchart.xml
Unfortunately, this won’t reflect your listening accurately if you’re in the habit of listening to leaked albums. For what are certainly legal issues, last.fm plays dumb that these albums even exist, failing to report them in charts even though the track and artist counts are updated accordingly.
My next step is to use the url embedded in the feed to scrape the Amazonian cover art from each album’s last.fm page. This would be cool to do even for the recent track feed, come to think of it.
A couple years ago I toyed with eDonkey and the Digital Archive Project as a means to collecting MST3K episodes. Turns out eDonkey is widely and rightly regarded to be a terrible piece of software, and the episodes weren’t well-seeded, so that went nowhere, and I opted to rip a low-quality ShoutCast channel for a couple dozen episodes.
Today, reminded of DAP by this comment at Lifehacker, and aided by a search on Demonoid.com, I was led to this page at The Pirate Bay, with links to torrents for every known available episode, all high-quality and all fairly well-seeded.