I recently got an iPod touch and had been looking for something to play streaming audio and Internet radio. I tried iRadio (iRadio.tgz) and while it looks promising it has a few problems (not the least of which is that it crashed my iPod touch a couple times) and wasn’t quite what I wanted (although the long list of stations is very impressive). I noticed several posters commented that what was really needed was a Last.fm client and that it was a shame that one wasn’t available. Although I vaguely recalled hearing something about Last.fm, I wasn’t familiar with it at all so I decided to see what I could find. I was pleasantly surprised to find MobileScrobbler. It look less than 30 seconds to install (from Installer.app) and as soon as I created a Last.fm account it worked flawlessly.

The Last.fm service is also amazing and I wish I had tried it a long time ago. One of its best features is that it helps you find music you might never have heard of otherwise. I’ve always enjoyed listening to Bessie Smith. I first heard of her when I lived in Chattanooga for a few years and attended the Bessie Smith Blues Strut during the Riverbend festival a couple times but I didn’t become a real fan until the professor for an American literature course I was taking brought a record player to class one day, dimmed the lights, played Bessie Smith singing “St. Louis Blues” and then challenged us to identify the singer. No one could although one person guessed it was Ella Fitzgerald. He knew I had lived in Chattanooga for awhile and seemed disappointed that I didn’t know the answer. There’s a lot of things I’ve forgotten from the years I wasted spent in college but listening to Bessie Smith that day is something I never forgot. Thus, it may not be surprising that one of the first artists I looked for on Last.fm was Bessie Smith. Under “Similar Artists” I soon found Victoria Spivey and I was hooked after the first couple songs.