Last.fm needs some affection
I already mentioned the shortcomings of the Last.fm website in an earlier post. From time to time, they make minor changes, but they’ve never come across as professional.
As it happens, the Windows client suffers from quite a couple of nasty bugs too. No piece of software is perfect, and they admit that by keeping a list of known issues, but some render the software unusable for me. I’ll describe the two that irk me most.
The first is that the client locks my sound card’s sample rate, even though it’s my media player that does the actual playback. As long as I keep the client running, some applications have trouble with the sample rate. I’m not sure if the—delicious—Qt toolkit they use includes audio libraries. If it does, those are probably to blame, otherwise they should really get around to fixing this, and also make sure that the sound card is only accessed if you actually decide to play something within the client.
My second grievance is mentioned in the list of known issues: Floppy drive spins intermittently for no apparent reason. They don’t give an explanation though, and “intermittently” is kind of an understatement. In fact, it does so whenever a track starts playing, and also when you go into the preferences to determine which directories you want to include in scrobbling. I’m guessing it all revolves around that feature, and it’s probably a Qt thing.
Until the quality of the client—and hopefully Last.fm in general—improves, I’ve decided to start using the more lightweight foo_audioscrobbler. Features I’d appreciate include a system tray icon or hotkey to enable or disable scrobbling on the fly, and the ability to select directories to include in (or exclude from) scrobbling, as mentioned above.