Comments on: Last.fm Ubuntu package

By: Roger L. Waggener

Roger L. Waggener — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:28:22 +0000

Hey- thanks a lot for this.

I am a linux newb. I just repartitioned and reinstalled XP and installed ubutnu last night.
As I was setting up all my XP prefs (dragging my Application Data dir from a backup HD back onto the OS HD ) listening to last.fm I thought to myself “Self, if I could find last.fm for ubuntu, I would totally kick the MS habit.”

Needless to say, the only reason to boot ‘doze now is if I am too happy and need to feel less good.

Thanks again.

By: ben

ben — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 22:21:00 +0000

Paul Telford, a debian maintainer, has made recent (unofficial yet) packages of last.fm player for both debian and ubuntu linux. check them at:
http://people.debian.org/~pxt/lastfm/

By: ben

ben — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 05:49:00 +0000

i made 2 mistakes in my previous comment:
- first, the url_handler must not be /usr/bin/lastfm but /opt/lastfm/player

- second, the gconftool-2 commands i gave were for “user” configuration, not system-wide configuration.

So, during the installation of the ubuntu/debian package, you can add
(as root) those commands for gnome:

# killall gconfd-2

# gconftool-2 –direct –config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults –type string –set /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/lastfm/command “/opt/lastfm/player %s”

# gconftool-2 –direct –config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults –type bool –set /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/lastfm/enabled true

# gconftool-2 –direct –config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults –type bool –set /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/lastfm/needs_terminal false

And this works: you can click on a lastfm link on your gnome browser and it launches the lastfm player with the url as argument.

but this give not a gconf schema for lastfm, so this is not completely perfect.

By: ben

ben — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:10:00 +0000

i don’t figure out how to make lastfm player work with an argument given (lastfm://somemusic) but when i will, you can add a gnome protocol handler for lastfm:// this way:

# gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/lastfm/command “/usr/bin/lastfm %s”

# gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/lastfm/needs_terminal false

# gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/lastfm/enabled true

then, clicking on a lastfm link will popup lastfm from your epiphny browser.

By: Amol

Amol — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 15:17:00 +0000

yeah, artsdsp did the trick. and yeah, I realize there’s no real performance advantage in installing the package, I just like having all my programs go through apt.

By: Stephen Paulger

Stephen Paulger — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 02:26:00 +0000

I haven’t set anything up related to the sound. For KDE users there is really no advantage in installing the package over what is available from the Last.fm site. I am actually using ALSA. As I don’t know much about how sounds works in linux your best bet is getting help from the Last.fm forum for the player.

I did have a similar problem before when I used esd and it seems to be common with the Last.fm player, one thread suggests that running the player with the artsdsp command helps.

If you want to do that after installing the package modify the /usr/bin/lastfm file. Change the second line to “artsdsp /opt/lastfm/player”.

If that works please let me know.

By: Amol

Amol — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 01:36:00 +0000

I tried installing your package, but I can’t seem to hear any sound. I’m suspecting that its because I use Kubuntu, and this package was made for Gnome, so you specified the use of esd instead of arts. Am I right? And if not, do you have any ideas what actually is wrong?