audioPod group on last.fm

I recently discovered the audioPod group on last.fm. They're using and discussing Lastpod, so please check it out and join up. It's great to see users excited about the application. Please help spread the word to other ipod users.

Also, if you have any problems that you know are a bug (or enhancement requests) please submit them. Or please help out by contributing a fix for one of the open issues. No login is required, just post away.

Multi-play Track Support

Please enjoy this blog post by Taw. He describes the issue well, better than I care to do at this late hour.

This feature is available in Lastpod r79. There is a new option in the preferences menu to enable/disable it. (It is *disabled* by default.)

New version of LastPod released

A new version of LastPod has been released. It can be obtained here.

The major new features are improved status messages and support for multi-play tracks. Please see the change log for all the details.

Implemented Mock Submissions and Tracks

I have implemented a mock setup which has mock submissions and tracks. Please review commit r71, r72, and r75 to see the implementation. Please submit your feedback if you have any.

This implementation allows me to test more easily and I have already made some usability improvements to Lastpod. (Which I have not released as binaries yet.)

Mock Submissions and Tracks

I have noticed a few "gotchas" when scrobbling tracks in a certain sequence. I am trying to develop a good way to test Lastpod without actually connecting to AudioScrobbler or having tracks on the iPod. Any ideas about how this could be accomplished? I was thinking some kind of IoC pattern and/or mock objects would work. What do you think?

New version of LastPod released

A new version of LastPod has been released. It can be obtained here.

Fixing "hanging" user interface and providing better submission progress

Recently I have been revamping the graphical user interface for LastPod.

One of my favorite new features are the progress indication components. LastPod used to provide no progress indication when submitting tracks. Actually, the user interface used to "hang" while the submission was occurring. I reworked the Submit button using Swingworker, which allows the submission to occur in a background thread, thus freeing the user interface from hanging. I used the "swingworker 3" implementation, which is compatible with JDK 1.4 or greater. I had a fairly hard time finding useful information on this implementation because it is getting fairly old. There is also a wealth of information about the latest SwingWorker, in Java 6, which is quite different from "swingworker 3".

After fixing the hanging, I realized LastPod needed progress indication. To solve this problem, I added a progress bar and a throbber. The progress bar (JProgressBar) updates as tracks are submitted. The throbber uses a Timer to repaint, therefore the animation is smooth. Both the progress bar and the throbber are updated from within the swing worker thread, otherwise submission would complete before the interface would ever refresh, which defeats the entire purpose of the progress indicator.

Please submit any feature or bug requests that you find.

LastPod: Direct iPod / Last.fm Integration

LastPod is a tool that will parse the "iTunesDB/Play Counts" file from an iPod and submit played tracks to AudioScrobbler (http://last.fm). LastPod directly interfaces with Last.fm, no additional software is required. This method is fairly unique, and I have only found a few other applications that support this usage model.

If you have not done so already please download and try LastPod. I believe you will really enjoy using it.

The project is released under the GNU Public License (GPL). Please feel free to review the code and/or suggest improvements.