If you're a Last.fm user (or know someone who is), you may know about Audioscrobbler, the engine behind Last.fm. Audioscrobbler provides a plugin protocol so that music player applications can update the server with the music you play, and exposes a set of public web services that let you access data and recommendations about Last.fm members and their favorite music.

What I haven't seen (so far) is any mobile interfaces to the Audioscrobbler database. In an attempt to fill this gap (and encourage others to experiment), I wrote a couple of simple Python scripts for S60 devices that demonstrate some of the query features of the Audioscrobbler API (This also gave me a chance to learn Python!). Read on for the details.

Of course, Last.fm is not the only social music game in town. Other services, like MusicStrands, are already experimenting with mobile clients, and offer their own public API's.

The first script is a modification of the File Browser that is included with the S60 Python SDK. When you navigate to an MP3 file, you have the option of looking up related artists from Audioscrobbler. Right now, the script just displays the results, but this can potentially be extended to browse for more music, or information about the related artists. I tested this script on a Nokia N91 with release 1.3.8 of Python for S60.

The second script shows how you might integrate social music with your Contacts. In this case, if you add your friend's Last.fm ID to his or her contact information, you can find out their favorite artists or tracks. I tested this script on a Nokia 6630, using release 1.3.1 of Python for S60. Note: This script will NOT WORK on S60 3rd Edition devices. Platform security blocks access to the Contacts from Python.

Thanks to Jürgen Scheible for his excellent Python tutorial, which made it much easier for me to get started. These scripts use Jürgen's application skeleton. The first one also uses code from here to extract MP3 metadata (thanks to Erik Smartt for the link!)

Feel free to play with these scripts as you wish, and let me know if you create something interesting!

-Oren