One of my main gripes with fb2k is the lack of components that have web-interactivity, in fact my comments in the “How can foobar continue to improve?” post were something to this end.

For those out of the hip circle or the cool loop; Last.fm is a service that aggregates tracks user’s “scrobble” and with this information generates recommendations, similar artists, charts and a lot of interesting relationships. There already exists a standalone Audioscrobbler component to submit tracks to Last.fm, yet with all the information contained within this personalised radio service foobar2000′s 3rd party components can get and give a lot more.

So here comes the news! Chronial has been working on a new “scrobble-charts” component. It is still very much in beta (i.e. it crashes) but its features are too impressive not to announce here. The component uses Internet Explorer connection settings to retrieve information from Last.fm’s web-services. Using this information two features are currently available;

• Create an artist playlist with tracks ordered by the Last.fm Artist Charts – essentially this mode re-orders your tracks in order of their popularity.
• Create a playlist of similar artists using the Last.fm similar artists list – this creates a new playlist filled with the artist selected and performers similar to. This makes creating theme based playlists extremely easy and is surprisingly fun to play with.

These playlists only select songs in your library. You can check out the latest version, change-log, some information and most importantly a download link here: Chronial’s Foobar Components (Thread).

I’m looking forward to new features.