General FAQ
Q. Are you affiliated with last.fm or audioscrobbler?
A. No. This is a small private experiment gone horribly awry.
Q. Are you making money from this?
A. No. ZenRadar is an experiment, and currently there are no plans to commercialize or significantly expand the service. We respect the license under which the audioscrobbler data is made available.
Q. What feeds are available?
A. Currently we are exporting augmented feeds for recent tracks, recently loved tracks, weekly album chart, weekly track chart, topalbums, and toptracks.
Q. How do I get the feeds on my site?
A. You can look here to see if there is a solution that meets your needs. Any script/plugin that handles the last.fm recenttracks.xml feed can easily be modified to accept the album data we're adding. If you come up with a script that you think others might find useful, get in touch with us and we'll post it in the library.
Q. Do you allow Flash to access the feeds from other domains? How about Silverlight 2?
A. Absolutely. We have a wide open crossdomain.xml file.
Q. Sometimes it takes a loooong time to load my feeds, my dashboard, or the album editing page. What gives?
A. Since ZenRadar operates on last.fm data from the audioscrobbler web services, we have to pull XML feeds from audioscrobbler the first time data is requested. The process of requesting XML feeds from audioscrobbler and waiting for the data to load takes time. Also, if we're pulling multiple feeds to accomplish one task, we wait a little while between requests in order to be courteous to the audioscrobbler servers. We cache the relevant data in our database so the next time it is requested, it loads much faster.
Q. My dashboard isn't showing tracks that I know I have recently scrobbled. Why?
A. Your recent tracks information is only updated when your ZenRadar recent tracks feed is requested. If your feed is not requested frequently, your information is not updated frequently.
Q. Something bad happened. Is this a bug?
A. Probably. ZenRadar is currently in the alpha phase of development, and most of the functionality is subject to change. We'll do our best to keep these changes from causing too much disruption.
Q. I have a suggestion for an improvement or a new feature. Do you care?
A. Yes! We'd love to hear your ideas.
Q. What's up with the crazy header images?
A. All of the header images are submitted by users. You can upload them from your dashboard. We rotate through them randomly, and overlay a translucent layer. If you would like to upload an image, please make sure it's optimized to be not too heavy. All submitted headers are subject to moderator approval before they are displayed.
Q. Who is behind this nonsense?
A. Rob Ruchte and Jeff Foxx
A. No. This is a small private experiment gone horribly awry.
Q. Are you making money from this?
A. No. ZenRadar is an experiment, and currently there are no plans to commercialize or significantly expand the service. We respect the license under which the audioscrobbler data is made available.
Q. What feeds are available?
A. Currently we are exporting augmented feeds for recent tracks, recently loved tracks, weekly album chart, weekly track chart, topalbums, and toptracks.
Q. How do I get the feeds on my site?
A. You can look here to see if there is a solution that meets your needs. Any script/plugin that handles the last.fm recenttracks.xml feed can easily be modified to accept the album data we're adding. If you come up with a script that you think others might find useful, get in touch with us and we'll post it in the library.
Q. Do you allow Flash to access the feeds from other domains? How about Silverlight 2?
A. Absolutely. We have a wide open crossdomain.xml file.
Q. Sometimes it takes a loooong time to load my feeds, my dashboard, or the album editing page. What gives?
A. Since ZenRadar operates on last.fm data from the audioscrobbler web services, we have to pull XML feeds from audioscrobbler the first time data is requested. The process of requesting XML feeds from audioscrobbler and waiting for the data to load takes time. Also, if we're pulling multiple feeds to accomplish one task, we wait a little while between requests in order to be courteous to the audioscrobbler servers. We cache the relevant data in our database so the next time it is requested, it loads much faster.
Q. My dashboard isn't showing tracks that I know I have recently scrobbled. Why?
A. Your recent tracks information is only updated when your ZenRadar recent tracks feed is requested. If your feed is not requested frequently, your information is not updated frequently.
Q. Something bad happened. Is this a bug?
A. Probably. ZenRadar is currently in the alpha phase of development, and most of the functionality is subject to change. We'll do our best to keep these changes from causing too much disruption.
Q. I have a suggestion for an improvement or a new feature. Do you care?
A. Yes! We'd love to hear your ideas.
Q. What's up with the crazy header images?
A. All of the header images are submitted by users. You can upload them from your dashboard. We rotate through them randomly, and overlay a translucent layer. If you would like to upload an image, please make sure it's optimized to be not too heavy. All submitted headers are subject to moderator approval before they are displayed.
Q. Who is behind this nonsense?
A. Rob Ruchte and Jeff Foxx
