Dorks And Losers

A few weeks ago, Last.fm announced a beta of Bof­fin [0.0.4 released] that acts as a Last.fm radio ser­vice with your per­sonal music col­lec­tion. It was an inter­est­ing con­cept which I have finally had the oppor­tu­nity to try. It only works with mp3s so I had to use it at work (which is a Win­dows com­puter unfortunately).

The soft­ware design is very sim­ple and only lets you inter­act with the tags Last.fm has for your music. The ini­tial scan was sur­pris­ingly long for my 4000+ file library. There is also an annoy­ing res­can of your library if you close and reopen Bof­fin with­out restart­ing your com­puter. This shouldn’t be automatic.

Boffin’s func­tion­al­ity is very inter­est­ing, and def­i­nitely more use­ful than the shuf­fle func­tion in iTunes or Song­bird. My biggest con­cern is that I plan to use Song­bird exclu­sively for my music when it’s (1) more func­tional and (2) much faster. Bof­fin would def­i­nitely need to be inte­grated into the core Last.fm client and even­tu­ally inte­grated into Song­bird as an updated plug-in.

Since the soft­ware is beta, I can’t really gripe but I’ve expe­ri­enced a cou­ple of issues. The above “There was an error dur­ing play­back” occurred quite fre­quently and once I couldn’t get out of the error box with­out force quit­ting the pro­gram even though the cor­rect music was actu­ally playing.

That was the more annoy­ing, but the other was that I had to have the Last.fm client open as well to scrob­ble the music in addi­tion to Bof­fin. The lat­ter issue is under­stand­able, but see­ing as how I was on my work com­puter there are only so many resources that it could han­dle with­out tak­ing a dump.

Grrr.

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