So Last.fm’s client finally features audio fingerprinting built in. Remember all the craziness of audioscrobbler and track moderation and all the various ways they’ve tried to make the content work.
I’d like to see, someday, a version of Last.fm (or really any service) that really works for classical music.
Classical music presents two main problems for these types of services: a) they often consist of several tracks that go together in a certain order and b) you really need to keep track of title, performer, and composer at a minimum or tracking number of plays makes no sense.
The first problem is a pretty rough spot… just a few weeks ago, Pandora announced that it was going to start including classical music–but if you play a classical station, you might get a movement of a symphony here, and something else random there. If you listen to a “conventional” classical music radio station, they’re not going to do that. But how does a system know to start with the first movement and play all the related tracks in order before moving on to the next work?
The second problem’s even more of a challenge in some ways because it’s so different from other genres and thus no popular online service works that way. Sure, the tags are there… but they’re not really using them. For a while Musicbrainz had a system of connecting artists to works and recordings by their contribution (lyricist, composer, performer) but it was so incredibly confusing that people didn’t use it.
foobar (and surely most other music players) has a ’shuffle by directory’ mode - if you have a playlist and want to play whole albums randomly you just select it. surely with a properly tagged and well filed music collection (classical or not) the first problem could be reduced to something as simple as a mode like this?
well, playing your music in a player is one thing, but tracking it on a web site like Last.fm is another. I’d like to know, for example, how many times I’ve listened to Beethoven Symphony no. 7 performed by any orchestra, or performed by a particular orchestra, or with a particular conductor. Or I’d like to know how popular a song cycle of Mahler’s is compared with another by Schumann. The cycle, though, not a given track.