Tuesday, June 24, 2008

How to stream all of your last.fm "recently played tracks" in FriendFeed

These instructions are being written primarily for the administrators of the lastfmfeeds FriendFeed room, but they can also be used by any individual who wants to add ALL of his/her recently played last.fm tracks to an individual FriendFeed page.

While FriendFeed's standard last.fm capability allows you to share the list of tracks you have loved, FriendFeed's ability to incorporate RSS feeds greatly increases FriendFeed's capabilities. Basically, any RSS feed, no matter how silly, can be added to FriendFeed. (Whether this will irritate your FriendFeed subscribers is another matter entirely, which is why I pulled my recently played tracks out of my own page and into a room.)

last.fm is, for our intents and purposes, a front-end to Audioscrobbler, the service that actually compiles the list of everything you play in last.fm. One of the available feeds via Audioscrobbler is the feed

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/LASTFMNAMEGOESHERE/recenttracks.rss


where LASTFMNAMEGOESHERE is, of course, replaced with your last.fm name (in my case, ontarioemperor).

So, whether I'm an administrator for the lastfmfeeds room, or whether I'm just adding a feed to my own site, I would do the following to add ontarioemperor's recently played tracks to FriendFeed.
  1. Go to the "Services" area.

  2. Click on "Edit/Add."

  3. You will see a list of all of the types of services that you can add. Click on "Blog."

  4. When asked for the Blog URL, type in the appropriate Audioscrobbler feed name (in this case, "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/ontarioemperor/recenttracks.rss"; substitute your own last.fm name for "ontarioemperor" to add your feed). Don't paste your last.fm page name; it won't work.

  5. Click the "Import Blog" button.

  6. Refresh your page, and you should see some recently played tracks on your page.
That's all there is to it. Enjoy.

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