Last.fm player for the iPhone
Today I tried out the new Last.fm iPhone client. It is pretty cool.
It captures the most relevant bits of Last.fm. All of my radio
stations are there: Personal Radio, Recommended Radio, Loved Tracks
Radio, etc. I can see upcoming events, my personal music charts.
The Now playing screen is especially slick - you can 'love' or 'ban' a track, read an artist bio, view the artist tags, find events related to the 'now playing' artist. It will scrobble the tracks it plays.
Probably the best part of the player is the sound quality. It sounds really good when compared to some of the other iPhone internet radio clients. (From what I can tell, I don't think Pandora's client even has stereo output (for shame!)).
I do have a few quibbles .. but since this is a 1.0 client, I'm sure they will be addressed right away.
- First of all, Last.fm's corporate color is red - which on the iPhone is typically reserved for really important things like "End the call". The Last.fm client however uses red everywhere - so when I look at the last.fm client I always think there's something wrong.
- I wish I could tag artists or tracks with the iPhone. Right now, I can only look at the tags that have been applied to the tracks.
- The volume control only lets me turn the volume up. Sometimes, I like to turn my music down too.
- You pay a price for the good sound quality. It took a couple of minutes to buffer a song over the edge network, and it was rather unreliable, with pauses mid-song while more of the song was buffered. I wouldn't recommend using the client unless you are connected to a WiFi client. When connected to WiFi it would take 10 seconds or so to buffer a song and even on WiFi once in a while, the playback of a song would pause while more of the song was streamed into memory. Not a good listening experience.
- Probably the biggest problem is that as soon as you want to do anything else with your phone, the Last.fm client quits and the music stops. Of course, this is not Last.fm's fault, but it does take away from the overall enjoyment of the music if you have to start a new listening session after every time you need to check your mail.
The last.fm iPhone client is nicely done - the price is right - so if you have an iPhone ... you should get this app.
hi paul,
in my opinion, last shouldn't bother with a client, but unofficiall support the unofficial client, mobilescrobbler.
to me, last.fm's foundation, core competancy, or value to me is in the recommendations, which as far as i know, are largely based on your listening behavior. most of my listening takes place on my iphone, and as of now, i can't scrobble. i understand the limitations of the sdk to a degree (re: background processes, access to music), but throwing their collective arms up and saying "we can't do it" makes me think the new direction of cbs/last isn't a good one.
it's a bummer, too. last has been the most reliable source of new music discovery for me.
-matt
Posted by @malbiniak on July 14, 2008 at 05:16 PM EDT #
Thanks for checking it out Paul! Your observations are good ones and we want to fix the things we can. The volume is particularly tricky and we're trying to come up with something cool. Looking forward to future versions ;)
Posted by Toby on July 14, 2008 at 05:36 PM EDT #