Music revolution hits NetBeans

Now you can enjoy last.fm radio directly in NetBeans platform! This module brings on-line radio client into your NetBeans GUI. All you have to do is to install from one up to three new modules (depending on which modules you have installed before). Sign in using your last.fm account credentials and then you can enjoy endless stream of the finest music.

Here is video about how you can install and use the module: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knMWYKif_Nk

This module requires the following dependencies:

• ascrblr
• jLayer
• SwingWorker

All these third-party libraries are netbeans-wrapped and packed into the zip file in Downloads section. More specifically there are three .NBM files in the zip archive:

• org-radio-lastfm.nbm (the main module)
• com-googlecode-ascrblr-api.nbm (module wrapper - contains both the ascrlbr and jLayer libraries)
• org-jdesktop-swingworker.nbm (module wrapper for SwingWorker)

This module was written in NetBeans 6.1. I didn't test it for NetBeans 5. The distribution modules oncluded the zip file were build using NetBeans 6.1 and Java 1.6.0_10-beta. It runs also under Java 1.5 but you have to build it yourself from source code.

Don't have last.fm account yet? Join in for free.

Why I developed this module?

Recently, I found myself listening to last.fm radio more then in the past. Until now this reguired me to start up Firefox and open last.fm web page (I know there are other ways but I didn't want to install specific players). I found this not to be very efficient because Firefox can eat a lot of memory and can be slow sometimes. Because I am using NetBeans a lot now I thought that it would be nice to be able to integrate radio client directly into this GUI (so I don't have to switch to browser window in order to skip track or stop radio). My goal was to deliver radio client with minimalistic interface (the panel in toolbar has only four buttons!) with one other optional panel which is used for sign in, artist or globaltag music search and provides basic info about actual track.

Release Notes

• Release notes

A lot of functionality in this module depends on ascrblr which is alfa release of java implementation of audioscrobbler library (still it has some limitations: for example it does not allow for rating of individual tracks now).

Known Issues

• Track duration information seems not to be always correct (this data comes from Last.fm service) - this can lead to unneccessary net traffic while the module periodically tries to downlaod new metadata for new track.
• Official issues list