Last.fm

[I-desire]

Is last.fm free? Sounds almost to good to be true

 

[MCS81]

It is free, just make sure to use your wifi connection rather than 3G or you'll eat up your allowance pretty fast.

 

[I-desire]

Cheers for the advice. So much for too good to be true. Is there a way of saving a playlist to use offline (say on the bus or train etc etc to save on eating away my contratced data)

 

[sookster54]

The app is free, and when you sign up you have 30 days free, and $3/mo is nothing, I love last.fm enough to dump Sirius.

 

[I-desire]

The app is free, and when you sign up you have 30 days free, and $3/mo is nothing, I love last.fm enough to dump Sirius.

Ah rite so up to 30 days i'm fine. After that will they just cut it off until/if i pay or what? If i don't like it do i have to just cancel my account or will it just not work after the 30 days?

 

[Tó Madeira]

I've never been asked to pay anything on it, set up my account ages ago from before I had my Desire.

Cracking app. I can set up the widget on my lock screen to control the tunes without unlocking my phone.

 

[d.knight99]

Last.fm is free, I didn't even think there was a paid version?

I love it, but just to let you know it isn't like spotify or anything. You can't actually choose which songs you listen to and when, it's like your own personal radio station that plays songs similar to artists you tell it you like. For example you'll see things like 'Jason Mraz Radio' which will play a few of his tracks at random along with other similar tracks by similar artists. You can skip tracks you dislike, but can't rewind, skip backwards or replay anything you want at will. You'll see what I mean when you start using it!

That is why it's free, but it's still an amazing way of discovering new music!

 

[I-desire]

Last.fm is free, I didn't even think there was a paid version?

I love it, but just to let you know it isn't like spotify or anything. You can't actually choose which songs you listen to and when, it's like your own personal radio station that plays songs similar to artists you tell it you like. For example you'll see things like 'Jason Mraz Radio' which will play a few of his tracks at random along with other similar tracks by similar artists. You can skip tracks you dislike, but can't rewind, skip backwards or replay anything you want at will. You'll see what I mean when you start using it!

That is why it's free, but it's still an amazing way of discovering new music!

sounds like a cracking app. Does it take up a lot of memory? How about the situation of wanting to listen offline? any possibilities or not? If not gimmie a near enough example of data usage in relationship with minutes played if you have an idea. Thanks for all the help guys

 

[Tó Madeira]

sounds like a cracking app. Does it take up a lot of memory? How about the situation of wanting to listen offline? any possibilities or not? If not gimmie a near enough example of data usage in relationship with minutes played if you have an idea. Thanks for all the help guys

the app only takes up 1MB but there is no way of playing songs offline.

not sure on the data usage, sorry

 

[d.knight99]

Yeah the app is pretty small as explained above.

Err well streaming uses about 1.2Mb/min (roughly) but you also have to take into account if you use the app itself and not the widget it downloads album artwork as well, searching for new artist radios etc all takes up data.

 

[Fatwaz]

it is free and everytime you play a song either from last.fm or your libary it saves it and you can say whether you love it or not thus increasing the choice to you.put in say u2 radio and it will play artists similar to u2.i love it for some old school 80's tunes(abc,david grant,mel amd kim etc)you can create playlists but to acees them you have to pay $3 a month i think.i've never felt the need myself and use it most days at work.

 

[I-desire]

Yeah the app is pretty small as explained above.

Err well streaming uses about 1.2Mb/min (roughly) but you also have to take into account if you use the app itself and not the widget it downloads album artwork as well, searching for new artist radios etc all takes up data.

Jee that's a whole lot of data. Just the wi-fi it is then

 

[d.knight99]

That's a pretty standard amount of data for heavily compressed audio. Raw audio data in .wav format for example is about 10Mb/min so it's been squished down to roughly 128kbps MP3, although for streaming it's probably the OGG Vorbis codec at about the same bitrate.

If the data was any more compressed it would be horrible to listen to! I think you shouldn't necessarily avoid using it on 3G all the time, just install 3G watchdog from the market and keep an eye on your usage. Bear in mind, if you wanted to stream video of a half decent quality you'd be looking at maxing out a 500MB monthly allowance in about 1 hour. 3G watchdog is a great way of keeping track of what you use!

 

[berlin bertie]

Its slightly disconcerting at first when you tell it to play a particular band/song and then it starts playing something else, but it seems to make a pretty good job of choosing songs in a similar genre, and as noted above seems to be a good way to find about bands you might not be familiar with.

 

[geemacd]

Mine has never worked right since 2.2, it plays 1st 10 seconds or more, then skips or force closes and looking at the comments for this and the alastfm app, I ain't the only one

Such a shame it used to work superbly well everywhere I went

 

[fried]

Another cool thing that Last.fm does is "scrobbling". If you enable scrobbling in the app, if you play regular MP3s on the phone, it will scrobble them, i.e. it will add them to your library on Last.fm which helps it build up a better picture of the music you like. This uses up a small amount of your data allowance each time of course. You can also enable high quality mode and set it so it only uses that mode when you're connected via wi-fi if you like. It's a great app considering it's free and it's a great way of discovering new music.