Listen to Last.fm with the Roku SoundBridge
Update: Listen to your Last.fm streaming radio on the Roku SoundBridge Using LastBridge.net.
LastBridge.net makes it really simple to listen to your last.fm music on the soundbridge. If that is what you are looking for then check out it out! www.LastBridge.net.
Updated Post
So a while ago, maybe 7 months ago I bought the Roku SoundBridge and I do like it. Recently I have been listening to a lot of last.fm to my personal radio / loved tracks. So while listening to last.fm I didn’t always want the computer to be on so I googled to see if there was any solutions. I found one but it was some kinda server written in python. I didn’t test it but from the read me file it seems you need to have your computer turned on. Which is what I am trying to avoid. Now I came up with my solution.
It’s basically a controller. You can use your a PSP that is if you have one, I do so I use that to control it when I am away from my computer. It uses a playlist file to play your last.fm radio stream. So not only can you use this playlist file with the roku soundbridge but also with other media players and its controlled via a web based controller.
It is written in PHP.
You can download it here. last.fm-for-roku-soundbridge-etc.zip
It’s super easy to setup. Just open the config.php file with a plain text editor and insert your username and password. The password need to be in md5. With Mac OSX you can open up Terminal and get your md5 that way. Type this in the termnial.
md5 -s [your_password]
of course replace [your_password] with your actual password and it then will generate an md5. If your on windows I don’t know how you would get an md5 but I found this app useful to get the md5sum.
fourmilab.ch/md5/ .zip file contain the md5.exe. Enjoy.
Oh yeah before I forget you will need a web server with php installed and with cURL. Thats it.
If you need a free php web host then here is a list 0php.com/free_PHP_hosting.php or you can always just search for one, although it’s always best to just buy web hosting its not expensive.
February 20th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Quite a cool idea. I manageed to update the config.php file with md5…. but what do I do then. I imagine it i a standard feature to upload all the files on a server, but how do I do that ?
Thanks a lot for designing this !
February 20th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Yes just upload your files to your web server and that is it.
then log into your Rocku Soundbridge and paste in the URL for the playlist. The playlist file can also be played with iTunes.
Ex. Here are my files: http://fernyb.net/last.fm-fernyb/
April 13th, 2007 at 5:30 am
This is pretty cool!! – i’m so looking forward to getting it up and running om my Synology NAS asap. However i’d like to know what last.fm station it tunes in to: the logged in users “Neighborhood radio” or what?
– And where do i have to change the code so i can tune into my personal station (or even my “loved” radio) since that i why i actually pay for the last.fm service.
If you don’t know the exact location/address/url of the other stations, i’d be interested in knowing how you found the address (or url or what ever your code does behind the scenes) that point to the specific radio station your code points the SB to today.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:20 am
I pay for last.fm too.
To add more station like your personal or favorites open up stations.php
and just insert them there. So for your Loved station the string in the stations.php file is:
$station[1] = “lastfm://user/”.USERNAME.”/loved”;
and where USERNAME is your actual username in last.fm for me it would be fernyb.
I am not sure what you mean by this, “I’d be interested in knowing how you found the address (or url or what ever your code does behind the scenes) that point to the specific radio station your code points the SB to today.”
April 13th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Thanks a lot for the info – that was the exact information i was looking for … just forget my badly formulated question – i hadn’t looked at the code yet, and didn’t know about the lastfm://-url (i was at work, actually 🙂
May 20th, 2007 at 7:36 am
When I load this page into my browser i see a message ERROR=Malformed session. Any ideas on a fix?
May 20th, 2007 at 9:57 am
It has been fixed if more issues arrive just post them here
May 27th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
I’m french so sorry for the misspelling.
Thanks for this! Exactly what i wanted to do with my soundbridge.
Three question for you?
– how can i play a station in association of an artist. It is like this: lastfm://globaltags/myArtist”
– When i do change station, is the soundbridge supposed to start playing automatically the new station or do i have to restart it’s connection to lastFM
– do you know a way for the soundbridge to display the name of the song and the name of the artist. I can code in php…. just point me the direction you take if you were doing it….
Thanks again for this app!
July 11th, 2007 at 3:59 am
Hi!
Thanks for making this great application – I have just one question about it: Is it possible to adjust the buffer size the Soundbridge uses to play the last.fm stream – I seem to have some pausing and re-buffering.
Also if you could send me an Joost! invitation, please 🙂
Best Regards,
Tero T
November 20th, 2007 at 2:18 am
He Ferny, I’ve using your application/scripts for a while, but all of a sudden it stopped working :S If I play the pls file in winamp I get an error: error syncing to stream.
The weird thing is that the script itsself seems to work fine, I get an ‘ok’ response from the lastFM site on handshake.
Any ideas?
March 13th, 2008 at 5:12 am
Hi Ferny
Another beginner here. I managed (trial and error and a steep learning curve!) to get a webpage up that looks like yours but with my last.fm station on it and even got that working on my Soundbridge Internet Radio.
I’m afraid I’ve done all that without really knowing what is going on!
If I press the buttons (e.g Skip this track) on the webpage, should that skip the track on the Soundbridge there and then?
It doesn’t. Hope you can help clear some mist.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:17 am
Unfortunately the skipping tracks will not work anymore. basically the script will the streaming file from last.fm and wrap it in a .pls file so it can be played in the soundbridge the streaming file changes address so the script also takes care of that.
hope this helps.
April 17th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Hey FernyB thanks for programming this one. I use it alot as I dont always want the computer on to play last fm.
Anyway it would be much better if the track details could appear on the soundbridge – is it possible?
July 17th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Hi,
I was searching for such solution. I want to buy that player and one of the things that was stopping me, was that I did not know if it was supported by last.fm .
Can I ask you some questions about the wifi hardware 🙂 I did not found your e-mail on the site. I am dropping mine 🙂
P.S. Really nice work. I saw the code. I thought that the script was restreaming, but it only creats a readable play list. That saves a lot of traffic. I am thinking if I knew the last.fm protocol… the script may be tuned to show the current playing song.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Hi, I was trying to use Lastbridge on the web. Whenever you go to ass/edit stations there’s an error. Is something broken and are there any plans to fix it? Thanks.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Maybe that should have read ‘add’ and not ‘ass’ !!!