As you may have noticed we recently sent out a newsletter, alongside this we've added to ability to control whether or not you receive e-mails from us. So if you'd rather just get on with listening to music and not hear from us again you can unsubscribe from all our future messages by editing your profile settings.
Matt Pugh who has been working on Libre.fm as part of the Google Summer of Code has contributed some new graphs for the statistics page. He's also continuing to work on more advanced statistics options.
Matt Lee has begun work on a new mobile interface for the Libre.fm website. And we've also started work on a Libre.fm client for the Nokia N9 GNU/Linux phone and any other future MeeGo devices.
Jonas Haraldsson has contributed a number of patches to improve the efficiency of some of our SQL queries, speeding up page loading times. He's also added support for a few extra web-service methods, further increasing the amount of information that programs can easily retrieve from Libre.fm.
Thanks to our translators we now have some new translations available, including Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch and Catalan, with others like Turkish and Italian under development.
It's now possible to specify that you'd only like to hear songs that other people have loved when listening to tag radio stations. So you can listen to stations filled only with great songs within a certain genre. This is in addition to our community loved station that allows you to listen all the songs that other people have loved.
]]>The most obvious change this month is the addition of a sidebar area which can be used to display extra information related to the current page. On pages where this isn't yet made of use of a block is displayed giving tips about interesting Libre.fm features that might not be immediately obvious to new users.
The first major use of the new sidebar is on the user profile pages, where any user who has loved some tracks will now see a box showing their neighbours. These are all people who like similar artists and in addition to displaying this information on the profile page you can now tune in to a user's neighbourhood radio station. This station plays all the tracks which this user and their neighbours have loved.
The HTML5 audio player has been updated slightly to add a volume slider, with your volume preferences being remembered throughout the site.
Radio stream generation has been improved, with better randomisation of selected tracks and increased speed when retrieving a playlist from the radio service.
As mentioned in last month's news we're taking part in the Google Summer of Code this year. We had a lot of fantastic applications, unfortunately we were only able to accept one student, Matt Pugh, who intends to work on improving our statistics, both in terms of how they're presented and the range of statistics available to both listeners and artists.
Although only one applicant was officially accepted, the two other top candidates, Luke Slater and Patrick McDermott have both agreed to work on their proposed projects over the summer anyway, with the GNU FM team mentoring them as if they were summer of code students. Luke plans to work on integration between GNU FM and GNU Social, bringing more social abilities to GNU FM and exposing a user's listening habits through GNU Social plugins. Patrick is implementing a plugin system for GNU FM, and writing a plugin to provide users with karma and badges, awarded for doing useful things around the site such as tagging a number of tracks or listening to a lot of free music.
There have been a lot of bug fixes this month, most notably fixing issues with artist URLs containing certain special characters and further improving the reliability of our service for forwarding scrobbles on to Last.fm.
As well as simply sending us your hard earned cash directly you can now help support Libre.fm via Flattr and BitCoin donations. For more details see our donations page.
]]>At the bottom of the main site (alpha.libre.fm) you'll now see a small drop-down box that allows you to select the language you'd like to view Libre.fm in. Thanks to the sterling work of a whole host of dedicated translators we now have pretty complete translations for Esperanto, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Slovenian, Spanish and Welsh. If you'd like to help translate Libre.fm to support even more languages then simply visit our translations page, sign up for an account and get stuck in.
This year we're taking part in the Google Summer of Code under the umbrella of the GNU project. If you're currently a university student and are interested in spending your summer working on GNU FM (the software behind Libre.fm) and getting paid to do so, then drop by the #libre.fm IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and have a chat with us about how to apply. There's only a few days left until the application deadline on the 8th of April, so don't delay. Further details...
]]>It's now possible for artists to add their tracks directly to Libre.fm themselves, rather than having to rely upon our imports from other services.
A lot more artist pages should now also show a picture of the artist in question.
A number of bug fixes have been made which should result in even more robust scrobbling, with better support for very long track names and improved support for forwarding scrobbles on to Last.fm.
The largest change recently has been the addition of support for flattr, a micro-donation service that makes it very simple to "tip" your favourite artists. Artists can easily associate a flattr username with their Libre.fm account, after which flattr buttons will automatically appear on both their artist page and on each individual song page.
Additionally the html5 audio player will now display an appropriate flattr button whenever a flattrable artist is played on our radio streams.
You can see an example of this in action on the page for paniq's song 'Heavy Working Robot' which was featured in this month's podcast.
Once you've loved a few tracks on Libre.fm you'll now be able to tune in to the mix and recommendation stations and have a selection of tracks that you might like played to you. You can access this by either visiting the "Radio Stations" tab on your user profile or by tuning in with your favourite desktop or mobile client.
User profile pages now also display a small selection of free artists that the user loves and artists we think they might like.
When viewing an artist's page we now provide a list of similar artists. This only works for artists that have been tagged, but it's now even easier than ever to help tag artists and improve our recommendations. In addition to being able to tag songs as you hear them on the radio stream, there's now a "tag" link at the top of artist pages making it possible to tag both free and non-free artists.
For user's of both libre.fm and last.fm who's scrobbling client only supports submitting to a single server we've got some good news, you can now connect your last.fm account with libre.fm and we'll automatically forward your scrobbles on to last.fm's servers. Simply edit your profile and select "Connections to other services", then click the "Connect to a last.fm account" link at the bottom of the page and configure your scrobbling client to submit to libre.fm.
We've updated our import of songs from Jamendo, meaning that approximately 1200 new free artists and another 20,000 streamable tracks have been added to our database.
]]>Right now, I'm sitting here, preparing for my talk on GNU FM (the software behind Libre.fm) at FSCONS in Gothenburg, Sweden. I've been away from my usual computers for about a week at this point, so I'm limited to the juicy goodness on my Sansa Fuze that I loaded up with tracks from eMusic and my collection before I left.
I realized, poking around on the player, there's a file called scrobber.log — then it hit me: 3200 songs I'd listened to, ready to be scrobbled. As it turns out, our own wiki has instructions on how to handle this file.
So, while I might be the last Rockbox user on earth to find this out, I feel especially lucky that there is a wealth of software out there that supports Libre.fm as well as Last.fm.
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