As from Yesterday I am no longer gainfully employed by Last FM. After a lot of soul searching I have decided to move on. This decision was made in part because I feel I'd gone about as far as I could and in part because the vision of the future for the MIR team is one that I couldn't really see myself being part of.

Read more.

The perceptive among you may have noticed that I no longer have a staff badge against my avatar. There's a good reason for this - as from today I am no longer gainfully employed by Last FM. I've decided to take some time out to pursue other things and take a well deserved rest.

I am going to keep my Global Mod privs and although I probably won't be as active as a lot of the other moderators I will be happy to assist with any moderator type things if you need help. Please note that this doesn't include requests…

I decided to make a Last FM web app for Google Chrome. I use Chrome all the time (it's the only browser worth my time) and so I decided it was about time there was a simple App shortcut for Last FM.

You are free to use this but please note that it is NOT an official Last FM product.

Enjoy.

We had our Last FM office xmas party last night. We played a number of games based on Nevermind The Buzzcocks. One of the games was for each quiz team to go and re-make a famous video.

This was my teams effort.
This is what the original one looks like.

Uncanny how accurate we got it, eh? In case you're wandering, I'm the rather cute middle guitarist with the massive fake boobs :)

My current favourite plug-in for my favourite browser (Google Chrome) is the most excellent Last.fm free music player

http://chrome-music.tumblr.com/

Now, if the author would be kind enough to add radio support I will be one very happy Scrobble Overlord :)

Last.fm: at last you can restore your scrobbles

Ok, I don't mean to make everyone jealous but there are some really cool benefits to working for last.fm. For example, today I decided to give the lastest last.fm official desktop scrobbler a whirl. I tried a much earlier version a while ago and whilst it looked promising it wasn't quite stable enough for every day use.

Well, I am happy to report the latest alpha drop is stunning and runs like a dream!!!

Read more about the forthcoming client here.

Big Kudos to jonocole and the rest of the client development team for doing such a fantastic job. I…

All,

We'd like to announce a small tool we've written for the playground that allows you to restore any artist or track you may have deleted from your library by accident.

It's not all bells and whistles, but it might be useful if you've ever removed something from your library only to have that gut wrenching feeling when you realize you've deleted more that you intended.

Here is the blog post announcing it formally.
http://blog.last.fm/2010/06/01/now-in-the-playground-restore-artist-tracks

Hopefully you'll find this useful but if you do find any issues of have any feedback please do let us know by posting on the…

I've been typing since I was about 5 (well over 30 years) and in all that time I never bothered to learn to type properly. Like many people I was a "hunt and peck" typist and the technique has served be well. My reason for not bothering to learn the correct, touch type way – or rather my excuse, because the truth is it was really just down to laziness – is that as software engineer it really doesn't matter if I can't touch type.

Well, a few weeks ago I decided enough was enough… everyone around me can touch…

Listening to a track and you want to sing along but don't know the words? Having trouble trying to figure out what your favourite artist is slurring?

Try this wicked tool that shows the lyrics to the track you're currently scrobbling!