By Pentadact

“Last.fm is a service that records what you listen to, and then presents you with an array of interesting things based upon your tastes — artists you might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, and much more.”

I guess my only problems with it, at the moment, is that it doesn’t record what I listen to or present me with an array of interesting things based on my tastes – artists I might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, or anything else.

It’s installed two plugins – one for Winamp which Winamp doesn’t recognise and which doesn’t work, and one for Media Player which Media Player recognises but which doesn’t work. The only time it understands that I’m listening to anything at all is when I use their dedicated player, which doesn’t know what to play me because it doesn’t know what I like. When it finally did play something I liked, I discovered there’s no way to tell it I like a track once it’s finished playing. It knows I heard it, but all it seems able to do with this information is display that fact on my profile page.

What on earth is this thing? What does it actually do? I keep hearing it compared to Pandora, but the way Pandora works is that I tell it what I like, it plays me things it thinks I might like, and I tell it whether or not I do. So far every stage of that process appears to be impossible with Last.fm.