ssidbroadcast wrote:Unless I'm mistaken, this seems slightly inaccurate zima. Yes, all iPods keep track of the number of times a song has been played, when it was last played, and will update/append your iTunes library with these new playcounts upon the next sync. However, songs played on an iPod do not update or "scrobble" last.fm accounts. A possible exception goes to the iPhone, although I'm not sure on that, either.
It is innacurate only when discussing iPod + iTunes funcionality out-of-the-box. Last.fm player plugs into iTunes to support scrobbling, some of the other iPod managers and audio players also do that (foobar does, if you're completelly anti-iTunes
, with foo_dop and foo_audioscrobbler plugins ; and
yes, even (usually not supported...) 1st gen Shuffle:
http://www.lastpod.org/ , and BTW, "managers" (just copy files onto Shuffle disk from file manager and run the very small app (yes, the dreaded drag'n'drop)):
http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net/ http://koti.welho.com/hylinen/ipod/ ). While not strictly an iPod funcionality, it is enabled by its design, making iPods the cheapest dedicated audio players that support Last.fm.
Skrying wrote:I'm a big fan of Last.fm and I use iTunes. The problem with this though is that the Shuffle is really in an entirely different price category compared to other manufacturers products. A 4GB Sansa Clip is about $45~, the iPod Shuffle 4GB is about $80~. $30 doesn't seem worth it for me in this price category. Certainly though in a higher price bracket, Nano and up prices, I would consider it a nice feature (one I'd want) to have. It's a value question, not "it's not a feature!" nonsense. This falls into a similar area as podcasts. Super easy on an iPod thanks to iTunes. However, again... we're in the low budget realm where $30 is nearly the cost of the products... yeah. Value call.
Fair enough, I just wanted to point out that iPods do have some nice functionality for their price. For me it was Last.fm support; I tired it for some time on Symbian S60 mobile phone, but even when only shuffling through tracks its music player is horrible (and eats battery). 1st gen Shuffle found for 15€ was a sensible choice for me (yeah, and I guess I'm one of the target demographic of "shuffle only player"; heck, I basically kept only one cassete in my Walkman for a few years; most I expect from my one playlist is for tracks to be grouped by mood, and since I modify the playlist very gradually there are no problems with navigation)...yeah. Value call.