My latest Second Life toy – a Last.fm player
I’ve been a fan of Last.fm for a while, and a really big fan ever since I noticed that Matt Biddulph, while he still worked at the BBC, pulled a very nice hack to update his ’sekrit’ user every time Radio 6 plays a song.
Anyone following Eightbar in the last few months can’t have failed to notice that we’re getting pretty interested in virtual worlds and the metaverse. Second Life is not the only virtual world out there, but it’s a popular one. Since it makes it fairly easy to build things, and now lets you make HTTP requests from within scripted objects, it’s a pretty handy environment for knocking up 3D artifacts which render web data in slightly more interesting ways than, say, the average RSS reader.
In between enjoying Second Life’s third birthday celebrations, I created this ugly beast. My Last.fm feed watcher (despite its similarity to a squashed fly – those are supposed to remind you of speakers rather then eyes) displays the title and artist of the last song I listened to. Eventually it might provide a more complete interface to show more information about my listening habits, but for now I’m happy to keep it simple.
June 23rd, 2006 at 22:18
This is great a gadget. I think music is going to be very influential in the next stage of the metaverse.
The Regina Spektor album a few weeks ago.
The partying on the radio 1 island and now the Universal guys get in on the act
Personal appearances, live concerts it does not even have to be the real artist if the virtual puppets look right. Music videos that you are in. Its all coming.
August 17th, 2006 at 23:27
Obviously inspired by the Thinkpad 750 series docking station. ;-)
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/2487/dock4al1.jpg
October 5th, 2006 at 21:44
[...] I’ve recently fallen in love with last.fm, a web 2.0 app which uploads the names of the tracks you’re listening to in iTunes and uses the information to generate a personalised radio stream based on the music you listen to. It didn’t take long before I started wondering whether I could use last.fm as a robot DJ in Second Life. last.fm publishes a number of web services which Eightbar used to display their last played track in Second Life and streams their radio in MP3 format, but unfortunately doesn’t make the URL of the MP3 streams easily accessible. Luckily, Vadar Madsen has built lastfmproxy, an open source proxy server for the last.fm radio streams. By remixing Vadar’s code in LSL I was able to mashup Second Life and last.fm to build the Last Sound System, which allows you to listen to last.fm radio stations in Second Life, change stations, skip tracks and mark a track as loved. The biggest limitation is that I don’t think multiple avatars can listen to the stream concurrently. It may be possible be work around this using an MP3 stream relay server, but it would be much better if last.fm allowed people to share radio sessions for robot DJed parties in Second Life. The open source Last Sound System is freely available in Second Life here. [...]
November 12th, 2006 at 23:14
[...] Matt Biddulph, who is the brains behind the Second Life Flickr screen and the Last.fm BBC Radio 6 hack (which I mentioned here on Eightbar a while ago), has come up with something even cooler. By way of introduction he points out that… Many people find the creation of 3D models in SL to be rather tricky. This is because there’s no built-in way to import polygon data as a mesh of 3D coordinates from an external modelling tool. Imagine if there was a factory object that could read a list of coordinates and spit out the results straight into the world, like a virtual 3D printer. [...]
October 5th, 2007 at 20:28
Is this a player you share with others? Is it available?
December 18th, 2008 at 11:04
I don’t think it’s available:(