Last Sound System

I’ve recently fallen in love with last.fm, a web 2.0 app which uploads the names of the tracks you’re listening to in iTunes and uses the information to generate a personalised radio stream based on the music you listen to. It didn’t take long before I started wondering whether I could use last.fm as a robot DJ in Second Life. last.fm publishes a number of web services which Eightbar used to display their last played track in Second Life and streams their radio in MP3 format, but unfortunately doesn’t make the URL of the MP3 streams easily accessible. Luckily, Vadar Madsen has built lastfmproxy, an open source proxy server for the last.fm radio streams. By remixing Vadar’s code in LSL I was able to mashup Second Life and last.fm to build the Last Sound System, which allows you to listen to last.fm radio stations in Second Life, change stations, skip tracks and mark a track as loved. The biggest limitation is that I don’t think multiple avatars can listen to the stream concurrently. It may be possible be work around this using an MP3 stream relay server, but it would be much better if last.fm allowed people to share radio sessions for robot DJed parties in Second Life. The open source Last Sound System is freely available in Second Life here.