Women in Technology

LastFM player doesn't seem to work on my Fedora Core 5. But, there is a great workaround. Amarok, a well known and very good player on most Linux distributions, has added the "Nearest Neighbor" stream in the Playlist menu.

However, the best result that I've found for specifying a specific genre is as follow:

1. Create a "Similar Artists Radio" station: Goto Last.fm. Under the "Listen" section type in an artist that represents the music you'd like to listen to under "Similar Artists Radio" and press return

2. Copy the Link Location: In Opera: Right Click "Play Your Station" icon and select "Copy Link Address". Similar procedure in other browsers to copy the address of the radio stream.

3. Create an Amarok Radio Stream: Go to Playlists in Amarok, Right-click and select "Add Radio Stream." Name the stream anything you'd like and paste what you copied in #2 above into the URL spot. This will be a long series of numbers.

That's it. Now you've got a new LastFM Radio Stream based on a specific artist. I assume that this procedure would work with most audio players that can play Internet streams.

Creating a Radio Stream based on the artist "Steve Reich" brought up pieces by Varese, Stockhausen, Eno and Glass. Just a minute ago, I was listening to "And You Don't Even Listen To Noise!" by Stilluppsteypa. (http://www.music-map.com/stilluppsteypa.html.) An interesting piece. However, the next piece played was: "Cooper's World" by Squarepusher. So, it's not foolproof.

Another example: I just created another station based on Stockhausen and the first tune is: "Part 2" by La Monte Young on Theatre of Eternal Music. Sounds like a bunch of squealing tires. Ok, it's 20th century! But, the next tune: Beethoven. Hmmmm.....