Audioscrobbler [Farscape Group]

[godcha]

A few of you probably know Audioscrobbler (http://www.audioscrobbler.com).
Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

I've created a [open] Farscape Group so if you wanna see what other members of our community listen to, then sign up to Audioscrobbler and join the Farscape group.

It's just for fun, nothing more.

Audioscrobbler Home: http://www.audioscrobbler.com
Farscape Group: http://www.audioscrobbler.com/group/Farscape


Audioscrobbler's server is sometimes rather slow but they're working on that.

and yep Audioscrobbler requires that you download a plugin which sends data to the server

[Nessus]

And who says spyware is no fun.

[ItsThatGuy]

Sounds like a cool little thing. Just got an inherent distrust of people picking up information from my computer.

[godcha]

Thought already that a some people might have that feeling hence my last in bold & italic written sentence, but who says your browser isn't secretfully submitting info to someone somewhere on the net, or your automatic scheduled update programs as f.e. your A|V software, or your download manager or for that matter any program with [automatic / approved] internet access...One can distrust anyone, any program

Some more info on Audioscrobbler's plugins/development:
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/development
http://sourceforge.net/projects/audioscrobbler

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/help
Audioscrobbler is designed to be as transparent as possible. This means that once you have installed an Audioscrobbler plugin, you don't have to do anything. Audioscrobbler will never irritate you by asking you to rate songs, asking you what mood you are in or anything else like that. All it cares about is which songs you play.

Audioscrobbler plugins are all Open Source. We're not keeping the data to ourselves either: Anonymous Audioscrobbler listening data is released under a Creative Commons License. This license means anyone is free to download and experiment with the data, but may not use it for commercial purposes.

Any time you feel like it, you can come to the website and check out your profile, perhaps try some of the suggested songs, see the suggestions from other similar people and generally marvel at what appalling music taste many people have compared to you.

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/help/faq.php#Privacy-spyware
Wait a minute... Isn't this Spyware?

No. The plugins do only what you'd expect; send your listening data to the Audioscrobbler server. They don't harvest any other information from your computer or secretly install spyware like Gator Claria or Bonzi Buddy. If you're really worried you can grab the latest source code from our Sourceforge project page and compile a plugin yourself :)

How is my privacy protected?

* We do not display email addresses, so no-one can link your username to your email address or harvest your address for spamming
* Plugins only send the name of the artist/album/song - not the filename, filetype or any other id3 info. This means we cannot tell whether your music is from an original CD or an MP3 file. We don't want to know.
* We rotate our webserver logs frequently and destroy them after extracting anonymous statistics
* Our protocol and plugins are open source, and spyware free.

But what if the RIAA get the database and know what MP3s I've got?

See the above question about privacy.
Unlike other services, Audioscrobbler does not know the source of any of your music. The Audioscrobbler database cannot tell if you played songs from an original CD or from an MP3 file.