Use last.fm? Statistics geek? Use ExtraStats to visualize your music habits

Once you've started using last.fm (a free music service which will collect music play statistics from your computer and then recommend other music you might like, among other things) you start collecting play statistics. I've been on last.fm for four years or so, I have a metric crapload of statistics.

Now if you'll look at the pretty graph at the top of the post, maybe even click the picture so you can see it in all its full-size glory, you will see at the bottom a timeline running from January 2008 to Januari 2009, with above it artist/band names in pretty colored ribbons. The wider a ribbon is, the more I listened to that artist at that point in time. Isn't that neat? You can clearly see where I fell in love with the Mountain Goats (the first time I listened), where I found Say Hi To Your Mom, and that I rediscovered my love of classical music somewhere in October.

Compare to this shot from 2007:


OK, if you are at all geeky and into music, statistics, and/or pretty graphs, you'll want to grab this software. It is free, it is (unfortunately) windows-only although it uses .NET so I guess you have a shot at getting it to work under Mono if you happen to have a different OS.

Grab the software here, ignore the big fat warning about it not working right now (it does), make sure .NET 2.0 framework is installed, and rock out. It can do much more than just these wave graphs, but I happen to like them. There are lots of settings to fiddle with and color schemes to try, so enjoy.