February 23rd site update

Hi there,

A few minutes ago we released a new version of last.fm. Here’s what’s new:

- Better location settings. For a while now, you’ve been able to set a “default location” in the Events section, to tell us which events to show you. We’ve now put that on your settings page, with all the other settings. Kind of makes sense, we thought.
-Pictures are one of those things on last.fm everyone likes. Our old image viewer worked OK but we’ve made some design changes to make it easier to enjoy images and to browse through from one image to the next.
- Shoutboxes are one of the features that make our pages more “interesting[13]” -- but they always looked a bit old fashioned. We did some work to make them cleaner and hopefully more usable. We hope you like it!
- Library Pages have been improved to give you more information about the albums and tracks you’ve listened to.
- We’ve also done lots of behind-the-scenes work to make the site faster and overcome some technical problems.
- Business as usual: We found and fixed lots of bugs, for example in the Music Manager and user search (It actually works now, amazing!).

That’s it for today, enjoy your brand new last.fm :)

Shoutboxes look nice. Bigger font, wider line-spacing? Looks much less dense.

Displaying all albums next to tracks in library pages is good. It may get annoying for some though, unless there's a limit to how many can be displayed. From my library I can see it goes to at least 6, which might not be a great use of space. Probably not an especially common problem though. The 'Unknown album's all over the place are also a bit off-putting, and I'm pretty confused by why so many of my tracks have them because I'm careful with my tags… it seems that they dry up August/September 2008 though, maybe there was a change in the handling of album data then?

I hoped your inclusion of a [sillynumber] hinted at something that would kill those, but can't see anything like that :(

The album name thing on library looks pretty interesting for songs we listened from the album and the single, but the "Unknown album" destroys everything, it should be removed from albums that have tags and left only on songs without the album tag

i don't like how instead of just the most scrobbled album, now ALL of them are listed by each track. it takes up too much space and is ugly. especially because for some reason there are a lot of "unknown albums" for me and i don't know why, because i too am careful with my tags...or there's 2 of the same albums listed because one of the tags are wrong (for example Mariah Carey - Butterfly: the correct one is listed and then one listed under "Mariah Carey (Featuring Krayzie Bone & Wish Bone)"). also i don't like how the tags for the artist aren't listed in the library anymore.

what i do like is how the album pictures at the top are displayed/how it says how many scrobbles each album has/the total number of scrobbles for the artist, and how it now tells how many different tracks you've scrobbled for the artist. (:

I completely agree with all of this. Don't like all of the albums being listed next to tracks, it looks so messy, but I love the scrobble counters underneath the albums.

When using the black last.fm theme user names appear as black-coloured text in the shoutbox, but using the red theme user names appear in the original blue-coloured text.

Is this intentional? I preferred the blue-coloured names, yet I use the black theme :[

SharedUmbrella said:
Love everything except the "Album" column in the library. It looks messy and highlights where I made mistakes in tagging albums years ago (and where tracks have been made available prior to an official single/album title being released). -.- And I agree that the "Unknown Album" is annoying - especially for tracks where there are already 2~3 album titles listed.
I second that.

I'm not normally someone who just complains about updates to websites for the hell of it, but I'm really struggling to find anything I like. As has been said, the album column in libraries now looks awful and the 'unknown album' thing is pointless. I especially don't like how, as jenny2 said, it looks so bad where last.fm, not us, has screwed up by scrobbling albums under multiple artists (i.e. Michael Jackson, Rod Temperton;Michael Jackson;Vincent Price and Rod Temperton all coming up under my scrobbles for Thriller when they should just be for Michael Jackson). And this is more minor, but I don't like how the dates and times for a song's plays aren't aligned to the right anymore - it looks messy.

I'm genuinely really annoyed that instead of focusing on things that needed to be fixed (total play and track counts under weekly snapshots still aren't back, for example), you've being doing all this.

To be honest, I really like the changes that have been made to the library view and the way the albums are being displayed now (including the "All albums"/"Fewer albums" feature).

I can understand how some people may think the library looks a bit "cluttered" now, but with the introduction of the new view I can see great opportunities for implementing certain features in coming site updates. The most obvious advantage of the new view is that you can spot mistagged scrobbles easily, but at the moment there isn't much you can do about it except for deleting the scrobbles affected which of course isn't really an option I'd seriously consider.

So what I'm really hoping for is that sometime in the future we will get the possibility to change/edit scrobble data. For example, you realize you scrobbled some tracks without an album tag, which will now display as "Unknown Album". It would be absolutely amazing if you could change non-existing album tags and relate those scrobbles to the proper album, or even change existing but wrong albums to the correct ones.

It's also great to see that after such a long period where virtually nothing seemed to be happening regarding site updates, the recent updates all are heading for the right direction.

Iskra42463 said:
Still no way to remove event location setting?

Iskra42463 - can you tell me why you need to do that?

Couldtryharder said:
Iskra42463 - can you tell me why you need to do that?

Oh, I don't *need* to remove it. But if, after having played with the event recs, someone decides they don't want their location info left on the system, the only option is to set it to somewhere they're not. That doesn't seem ideal, imho.

i don't like how instead of just the most scrobbled album, now ALL of them are listed by each track. it takes up too much space and is ugly. especially because for some reason there are a lot of "unknown albums" for me and i don't know why, because i too am careful with my tags... [2]

library is soo ugly now. i hope you'll back previous version.

the fonts really need a unified design, it's all over the place.

I kinda like the changes to the library, but unknown album + 20 entries per track don't look good.

That whole library thing... no sir, i don't like it.

-G.