Last.fm scrobbling is a feature that many apps on operating systems such as Android or iOS already support. Spotify is one of the apps, which enables scrobbling to Last.fm, however this app does not support scrobbling on Windows Phone. Over time some other Last.fm apps have appeared on the platform. Some of them profile browsers, but also a very basic scrobble app was published. This scrobble app however lacks the ability to browse the music library and relies on the Music+Video Hub to select songs for playback. These limitations inspired the creation of Muze for Windows Phone.

Muze for Windows Phone is a scrobbling app which enables you to browse your collection of songs on your Windows Phone and allows you to control which song you are playing without having to switch back and forth between the Music+Video hub and this application.

The development of Muze is nearing its completion, and the app will be ready for certification within 2 weeks. In a few days I will be posting some screenshots and a list of current (v 1.0) and future features of Muze. So stay tuned!

Yours, Marius

Because most of our projects require us to learn new things we sometimes test some small things before using them in the real application. We decided that we will from now on provide some of these small projects for you. We will call these projects Minis.

The first Mini I would like to present to you is a small media player. This simple program was made with Windows Presentation Foundation. I created this Mini because the Last.fm Gobbler application will need to play media files later on. The Mini called Simple Music Player, demonstrates the insanely simple implementation of a media player in WPF.

You can download this Mini here.

Playing media files in WPF is easily implemented due to the MediaPlayer class, which is already in the library of WPF. This class is very straightforward, with some of the methods being called for example Open, Play, Pause and Stop.

We hope you enjoy this and future Minis.

Yours, The Gobblers

As you may have noticed, there has been a communication silence from our side. This is mainly due to the fact that our Bachelor Projects are currently taking most of our time. The next few weeks will then be spent on relaxing and other such things. After that we will be back and hope to give you some more updates.

Thank you,

The Gobblers

Hello everyone,

We finished our game Backfire and since it was a school project we were graded, not only on the final results, but also on the documentation and the things we learned from the project. We are pleased to say we got an 8 out of 10 for our project and with the complements of the supervisor. We are very happy with the grade and can now continue with our other projects, but the next month there will most likely be no progress, since all of us are busy with the completion of our bachelor.

Yours,

The Gobblers

A while back I announced that I started work on a Last.fm music player, which can fetch information from the site and displays your listening stats; Music Gobbler. I announced that I would be using Windows Forms in C# for this project. However, recently I have come to know a bit more about Windows Presentation Foundation.

WPF is a development framework which combines application UI’s, 2D and 3D programming, documents and multimedia. This gives much more freedom on the structure and the appearance of the application. Problems I encountered with Windows Forms were related to these topics. Making an application look good is much harder with Windows Forms, presenting your content in a nice way is a whole different cup of tea. I therefore decided to start learning more about Windows Presentation Foundation by using the website WPF Tutorial. Music Gobbler will therefore most likely be done with WPF in C# using the lastfm-sharp library.I have already begun with some tests on WPF and will continue to do so until I have grasped it a bit more.

I also stumbled on problems with the lastfm-sharp library a while back. The implementation of the Last.fm API is no longer complete due to the fact that it was probably implemented when the API had less features available. I will therefore have to expand the library to my needs during the development. The problem I have stumbled on right now has to do with fetching the dates of recently listened tracks. This is not possible right now.

I will post updates on my progress when I make it, however Music Gobbler hasn’t got the biggest priority at the moment due to University related projects and homework. I’ll do my best.

Yours,

Marius