Chris Herring » lastfm http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk Interaction, development and everything in between... Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:34:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Mapping Music: Part 2 http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/16/mapping-music-part-2/ http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/16/mapping-music-part-2/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:24:18 +0000 blog.chrisherring.co.uk http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/?p=151 After getting slightly distracted with the makeover I gave this blog last week and getting stuck into other work this week, I managed to spend a few hours this morning working on my Google Maps and Last FM mashup. Not to much to report, although I did managed to calculate a chart for the most popular artist across Europe. Initially I was slightly disappointed with the figures perhaps I was expecting plays in the millions. After some calculator consultation the total number of top ten plays at 3mins estimates at 2.53 years worth of music. Impressive.

One issue that has risen is the high number of requests made to the Last FM api in order to get the country specific data. The choice was between using the 27 European Unions member states, or the 49 countries which exist geographically within Europe. For the moment I’ve gone with the later, and ignored the 1.4mb of requests needed to complete this, but due to the Last FM api there is no other way of fetching the relevant data. A consequence of this is that Europe looks far more busy and the chart below is more populated.

The above image shows the chart generated after each of the European Countries data has been collated. I was slightly frustrated that the feed from the Last FM api isn’t live or updated on daily basis, instead I believe its updated weekly. I have uploaded the above build of Mapping Music and can be viewed here.

Next
- Individual country charts
- Comparison charts
- Improve the interface
- Look into a chart timeline.

]]> http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/16/mapping-music-part-2/feed/ 0 Fact: no. 1 http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/08/fact-no-1/ http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/08/fact-no-1/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:13:50 +0000 blog.chrisherring.co.uk http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/?p=128 Playing about with my little project Mapping Music and found out that 1.527% of people listening to Sigur Rós on Last FM in Europe come from Iceland. Interesting

]]> http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/08/fact-no-1/feed/ 0 Mapping Music: Part 1 http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/05/mapping-music-part-1/ http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/05/mapping-music-part-1/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:59:23 +0000 blog.chrisherring.co.uk http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/?p=107 Mapping music is the title of a little project I started over the weekend, hopefully over the forthcoming days I shall be blogging on its development. The idea is to use information gathered via Last FM and the visualize this geographically for Europe using the Google Maps API for flash. In doing so I’ll try to calculate the most popular artists across Europe and have fun learning something new.

Structure
At the moment I have an xml file which contains a list of countries within the Europe, then for each country I have attributed a latitude and longitude value. This is represented in the image below with a blue dot. It is easy to notice some of the dots are not in the centre of the countries, a by product of Batch Geocoder which is rather good.

In order to collate the information from Last FM various API requests are made relating to each Country. On the edge of the image below, I have quickly displayed each Country and its most popular artist.

Next
- Add an interface of some sort
- Figure out the most popular artist in Europe.

]]> http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2009/01/05/mapping-music-part-1/feed/ 2 Things to make and do http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2008/11/25/things-to-make-and-do/ http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/2008/11/25/things-to-make-and-do/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:39:02 +0000 blog.chrisherring.co.uk http://blog.chrisherring.co.uk/?p=40 Recently I’ve been working on a Lastfm and Flickr api mash up using Flash. The idea is you are able to search for images based upon the most listened to artists for a searched for Lastfm user. At the moment I’m integrating some extra information for the users popular artist and their related flickr images, and possible some data visualisation.

While doing some research into my little project last month I discovered the beta version of the BBC Music page, on these two blog posts 1, 2. Not only are the blog post very interesting but they also go into some detail about the BBC’s integration of the MusicBrainz community service. Each artist on MusicBrainz has an unique ID which looks like ba853904-ae25-4ebb-89d6-c44cfbd71bd2 and based upon this the BBC are then looking up artists related links, scraping information from Wikipedia and using it as part of the artists biography see Blur for example. Pretty cool I’ll hopefully write a longer post about this over the weekend.

Anyway back to what I was writing, I was thinking about using MusicBrainz api to conduct my searchs for related information on artists for the little Lastfm and Flickr api mash up I’m creating.

On chrisherring.co.uk I’ve added a diet version of my Flash api mash up as a banner, which searchs for my most popular music and fetches relating flickr images. The results are interesting as new photos are tagged, especially searching of Foals:

Radiohead:

Foals:

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