Music with Nokia N900

Music plays significant role in my life, there’s always something playing when I’m on bus, train, at home, at work, anywhere. N900 allows even more possibilities with built-in media player.

One of the very first thoughts after unboxing my N900 was that I want to test it’s media player, pack it with my favourite music, check files indexing by tags and subsequently use last.fm so-called scrobbler to keep track of what I’m listening to. I even wanted to write my own daemon or plugin to make it possible, but someone was faster than me. Right then there was a package called mafw-lastfm (aka. Last.fm scrobbler, available in extras-devel), and then it was still pretty buggy. Today I use it every day without any problems. Only thing you need to do after installing is going to settings, and put your login and password in Last.fm settings.

Last.fm in settings screen

Last.fm login and password settings

If it comes to music I don’t have good memory for titles, artists, albums and so on. Sometimes it would be nice if I could check what I’m currently listening to while browsing the internet in the same time. Lately I’ve found Now Playing Notifications (available in extras-devel), which pops info as for the mail or text message every time the next song is being played. One thing you should know before you start using this is the fact that every time notification is displayed and screen is not locked backlight will be turned on, so be careful with your battery life when using this stuff. After installing you will also experience N900 reboot, it’s normal in order to turn on new notifications.

Now Playing Notification

This is what I find really good in Maemo society, some people think in similar way and I can get something I need just because someone thought the same.