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"Some say there's a music startup bubble; we say, \"Bring it.\" Few apps are more welcome in our browsers and on our desktops than ones that help us enjoy our favorite tines.\nToday's pick is Like.fm, a brand new app that lets you track the music you play \u2014 both on your computer and on the web \u2014 make a playable list of your favorites on the web, and share what you're listening to with your friends.\nThe app harnesses the power of YouTube, Pandora, iTunes and a slew of other music apps to gather information about the music you listen to, then give you options to play that music and discover more music while you're away from your own computer or MP3 player.\nHere's how it works: First, you quickly sign up for Like.fm using your Facebook account \u2014 the service lets you automatically follow any Facebook friends who are also using the app, a feature which you can adjust later. \nAfter signing up, you install a background-running, lightweight desktop app that tracks what you're listening to on iTunes or another desktop music player. You can also choose to install a similar web tracker that keeps tabs on the music you're getting from Pandora, YouTube and a slew of other sites.\nOnce you're signed in, just start listening to music as you normally would. Like.fm creates a history of what you've listened to in real time. If you don't like an item in your history, you can always delete it from your profile page. If you listen to a song at least 80% of the way through, it gets added to your profile's summary.\n\nAnything that you've listened to on your computer or on the web, you can play on Like.fm from any web browser that can handle YouTube videos; the songs run in a tiny, embedded YouTube player, and each song is a video. Any song on the site can be added to your Like.fm queue by clicking the plus sign next to the track name. \nOf course, you can also see recommendations from your friends, and you can play and add their songs to your queue, as well. The app also has pages for specific artists; you can play and add those songs to your queue, as well.\n\n\nOnce you start your queue's autoplay, it runs the same way an iTunes playlist would; it's continuous and doesn't require a lot of fiddling around on your part. Then again, its features are pretty basic so far; you can only create on queue, and the queue isn't sortable or searchable \u2014 not yet, at least.\n\nYou can also write reviews for individual songs, get lyrics (via Lystener), download your entire play history as a text file, share songs to Twitter or Facebook, and participate in a handful of other lean-in features that music fans are sure to love.\nLike.fm is a Y Combinator startup; since it's freshly launched, it's still got a few bugs and is likely going to add a bunch of new features in the near future.\nFor now, though, we're thoroughly impressed with what we've seen so far; the app is simple, a pleasure to use, extraordinarily functional, and free, to boot. Give it a shot, and let us know what you think in the comments.\nImage courtesy of Flickr, noctopia."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/07/like-fm/>