Paul Johns

Not too long ago, I started looking for a good social music service. My first choice was Last.fm, but after spending about 15 minutes with it, it wouldn’t upload the data from what I was playing to my profile on their site. In other words, it wouldn’t scrobble.

Recently, I went back to their site and checked the support forums regarding using Windows Media Player 11. I noticed that a lot of other people were having the problem intermittently, which to me seems like an issue more with their service than with my player. So, tonight, or if I don’t get the chance, tomorrow, I will probably give it another go to see if I have better luck.

This situation got me wondering, “Is there a better, more reliable alternative to Last.fm?” From the quick research I did, the answer seems to be, “not really.”

What I’m looking for is a service that allows me to use WMP 11 with a plugin that automatically updates their service to list of some kind that allows me to pull the data to display to this web site. I checked out a few alternatives, like uPlayMe, but it’s still in beta, and it isn’t clear whether or not they support WMP 11 without signing up first. Not great.

I also checked out PureVolume, which seems cool except that they require you to download their own player. Since I use Windoze, I always try to keep my hard drive free of clutter and unnecessary software, so PureVolume was a no go.

I did, however, find this cool article over at Mashable.com that happens to have a list of the top music services that were up for an award in 2006. I guess I have my work cut out for me. I will post again once I finally find a music service that I am happy with. Until then, the search continues.