October 29, 2008
Announcing TheLastRipper development discussion group/list
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been actively developing TheLastRipper, even though I’ve been promising myself I’d find time for it over and over again…
But since there’s other people who have shown interest for the project, I’ve decided that it’s probably best if project coordination happens in an open forum instead of just sending mails between developers. Therefore I’ve created a TheLastRipper development discussion group for discussion of project direction, features, technical matters etc. without always having to create an issue in the issue tracker.
I’m not leaving the project, just realizing that with my current activity or just in general, it’d probably be good for a project with multiple developers to have a development list for discussions of all the stuff we can’t fit in the issue tracker.
So if you’re interested in TheLastRipper development join today…
Update: I’m happy to announce that Andreas Langmann is also a project owner now, so that I’m not the only administrator…
January 12, 2008
Release of TheLastRipper 1.3.0 for Windows
Development on TheLastRipper have been stalled for a while, but thanks to Andreas’ work we’re now able to release TheLastRipper 1.3.0 for Windows. It features:
- New GUI station selection improvements.
- Using the new last.fm protocol version 1.2 (Skip now works!).
- Additional management features like skip songs already recorded.
- A few other minor details…
This release is largely created by Andreas, since I haven’t really had time for it. Which is also why it’s not ported to Linux yet, though the executables with Windows.Forms GUI runs fine under Mono/Linux, we’d like a GTK# GUI because it’s much prettier. I hope I’ll find time to do a Linux port soon…
Now some might be wondering why it’s called version 1.3.0 and not 1.2.0 – well, what can I say: It’s a “known issue” 
I think I accidentally incremented it one too much, and since we can’t really delete downloads from GoogleCode it’s going to be version 1.3.0 instead. It would also look weird to have a version 1.2 featured and a version 1.3 deprecated.
Anyway I don’t think the version number thing is so bad either, I think I previously stated that there wouldn’t come a version 1.2.0, because I was going to rewrite the codebase. Because a rewrite would be needed to make a clean, easy portable and extendable backend implementation of the Last.fm protocol version 1.2. I started development of such a clean backend, but it’s still stuck in development, since I don’t have time for it at the moment.
September 15, 2007
First final OS X release, version 1.1.1
I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally ported the bugfix from the 1.1.1 release to OS X. As reported earlier all prior version of TheLastRipper are broken, due to minor changes on the serverside. This means that we haven’t had a working OS X version for about 2 weeks, the Windows and Linux versions were patched within 3 days, but since we don’t really have an OS X developers on the team this took a while longer. Anyway, it should work now, we’ve also added menu entries linking to the help pages on our wiki. Our beta was close, but not all done, now we think that we’ve got a fairly stable and feature complete version for OS X, therefore this release will be known as TheLastRipper for OS X version 1.1.1, yes it’s final not a beta.
September 5, 2007
Last.fm protocol version 1.2, unofficial documentation
As I promised a few days ago I’m releasing the unofficial Last.fm documentation that I’ve been developing in cooperation with Tobias Brennecke (tburny) and Matt Brown (blueboxed), two other Last.fm users. This new protocol for last.fm is very interesting, it offers a small playlist instead of one long audio stream, this is nice since metadata is included in this playlist. The unofficial documentation is available from TheLastRipper wiki, here. All the operations should be possible to do with Firefox.
Anyone familiar with the old protocol (version 1.1) knows that Last.fm gave you an mp3 stream, and a place to go if you wanted to request the metadata associated with the music currently playing. This wasn’t very nice, because you had to guess when a new song started, I know that the last metadata response contained information about how long the song was, but you didn’t know exactly when the song was started. Alternatively it was possible to search the stream for mp3 headers, which gave you precise information about when a new song started. But that required some computing. The new protocol just returns an XSPF playlist with mp3s and metadata, now that is very nice.
September 3, 2007
All prior versions of TheLastRipper broken!
I regret to annonce that all current prior versions of TheLastRipper are broken. It seams that Last.fm dropped support for had a bug in their 1.1 protocol, this weekend. All streams optained from this protocol returns “HTTP/1.0 667 Not enough content left to play this station”. I think it’s a shame, considering the amount of opensource audio players out there with playback support for Last.fm version 1.1. Since all of these audio players, including TheLastRipper have been broken.
Nevertheless, I and some other last.fm users have developed an unofficial documentation of the new last.fm protocol version 1.2. I’ll release it shortly, and I’d expect a implementation of this new protocol for TheLastRipper to start rather shortly too. If you want to stay updated on this issue, you can subscribe to issue 63. You do that by clicking on the star.
UPDATE:
Last.fm didn’t drop support for 1.1 protocol it was just gone for the weekend + Monday. Though a minor change in the login scheme caused TheLastRipper to freeze, this issue have now been fixed, and latest release of TheLastRipper works (Version 1.1.1). We’ll still be working on an opensource implementation of the Last.fm 1.2 protocol.