Are you scrobbling yet?

Ok. I've been on this site(http://www.last.fm) now for almost a year now and i have to say, wow. It's transformed the way i listen to music. Recommended many great artists and even does a half way descent job of playing auto-dj as well. Sometimes it finds one of my closet tracks and gets on a bad kick, but a swift kick and a new "seed" track and it's off and running smooth again. pretty cool...

So how's it work? First off you must have a decent mp3 collection to start with, i mean several dozen artists at least. I also highly recommending having your pc set up as a multimedia station, complete with quality sound as well. The last.fm software can work with all the major mp3 players. I think even MediaPlayer if that's all you got. I personally use MediaMonkey and it really kicks if you have a larger mp3 collection like mine(nearly 17,000 tracks). Winamp is my personal recommendation next. A lot of people use iTunes.

So you download a plugin for your setup and it monitors your mp3 player and streams the names of the tracks to a central database deep in the last.fm farm somewhere. Then based on your particular tastes it recommends new music, events and such. It takes awhile to get your personal contribution built up, but you just have to ignore it for awhile as your listening as usual, before long, the recommendations will get better with more variety in your listening habits.

I also use a plug-in for my mp3 player that connects up to the last.fm database and plays my music for me. For MediaMonkey i use MonkeyRok, but i think there are other similar plugins for other players.

If you listen to a lot of mp3 music on your computer like i do, you should definitely check out this site. http://www.last.fm

The actual technology is called scrobbling. I guess kind of like twitter, but for your music.