Finding Your Favourite Sounds Has Just Got Easier: LastCloud

A few weeks back we came across LastCloud, a great web app that lets you find mixes, Podcasts and radio shows on Mixcloud based on music from your favourite artists on Last.fm.

It’s amazing to see what people build with a little bit of imagination, which is why we opened up our metadata. The guys behind the project did it out of pure passion for music by simply using our and Last.fm’s open APIs. We’re honored to see that our platform is used by others in ways we haven’t thought of or implemented yet and we strongly encourage everybody with the right skills to do it.

Karl Tryggvason, one of the guys behind LastCloud tells us more:

We made this about half a year ago. I’m a software developer and I was looking to learn some more about web development/programming, I find the best way to learn is to do a project that you find interesting. Both Last.fm and Mixcloud have these good content rich api’s and mixing them up hadn’t seemingly been done before. I like both services, Last.fm for tracking my music listening habits and the recommendations and Mixcloud for providing a good way to share and listen to mixes and still support the artists in question. So Lastcloud seemed like a good idea.

I made the back end and my friend Leópold did the front end stuff with me (CSS, design and Javascript). There was no plan really. The main point was just to learn about web development and working with API’s and hopefully make something that worked well, looked nice and might be useful to some people.

We are both dj’s and music fans, I’m one of the people running Breakbeat.is here in Iceland (we host a website, radio show and events in Reykjavik) and Leópold is part of the house duo Put My Hands in Your Pocket. Also both of us like the web and related technologies and hacking on stuff related to it.

As a side note it’s interesting to think about the different recommendation aspects offered by these two services: Last.fm uses data and algorithms based on your own music tastes and the rest of the community (collaborative filtering and wisdom of the crowd) to make recommendations whereas on Mixcloud you can discover great music by connecting with DJs and radio presenters you like – more of the human factor. I find both ways useful and complimentary.