Long time readers of this site will remember that for a period of time it lived as Bluepear Radio… a music intensive blog that utilized the Live365 streaming services to deliver carefully constructed playlists straight to the desktop. For one reason or another (mainly financial… I got tired of paying the monthly fee) that ended.

I recount my feelings about that whole time in this post. Long story short I decided to put my musical time and effort into a free iTunes/last.fm combo. Well friends that set-up is starting to bare fruit. If you take a gander at the sidebar here on this site you’ll notice the new last.fm radio player… embedded flash goodness.

While this isn’t quite the same thing as actually constructing playlists like I did at Live365 it is a nice jump back in that direction. Since Last.fm has so much data on my listening habits (they pretty much know exactly what I’m playing in iTunes at any given moment) they are able to automatically create a “station” based on that data. So what you hear when you push play over there in the sidebar is quite close to the music I actually have in my library and listen to on a daily basis.

What’s missing is any kind of fine grained control over segues, access to bands that I love and aren’t in a licensing deal with last.fm, and customized sound effects or enhancements that might make it into a “hand-made” playlist. I can live with that and I am… quite happily thus far.