We love to consume media, and so we spend a lot of our free time reading books, watching TV shows, movies or listening to music. It’s difficult to keep track of specific movies, and TV episodes, especially when we watch them over years and decades. It’s also handy since tracking what you listen to, knowing your favorite songs, music albums or artists can help you discover new music, and similarly, books, TV shows and movies. Many of us have done this in the past, using Excel spreadsheets or notepads but these days, there are services let you track your music playback, while also being able to mark which shows and movies you’ve completed.
Let’s begin with tracking TV shows and movies. One of the most popular services is Trakt.tv. It has a humongous database of TV shows and movies including the most obscure and unheard-of ones. You can use it to read about new TV shows and movies without registering an account but if you do, you can keep a record every time you complete a TV show, an episode or a movie. The service treats every user like a movie blogger or reviewer. One can look up a specific TV episode or a movie for comments and ratings given by other viewers. Genres of movies and TV shows are also detailed on every page. When you start watching some content, you can simply check-in and you can also see a real time dashboard of all the TV shows and movies being watched right now. The service even lets you mark entire shows and seasons at once, so you don’t need to go about ticking every episode yourself. This is useful for shows and movies you have already watched.
Trakt.tv supports many developers who make apps and software for platforms ranging from Windows PCs to Android smartphones and Apple devices, so depending on the movie player, you can sync your playback with the service. Although, on a desktop, it’s simpler to go to the trakt.tv web site and mark shows as watched. On an Android smartphone however, there are free apps such as SeriesGuide that let you note all the content you watch in seconds. SeriesGuide is just one example and there are plenty of other alternatives for iPhones, iPads and Android. Simply look up your smartphone’s app store for ‘Trakt’.
Users can use Trakt.tv to look for popular reviewers and other users who have similar interests and check out their lists of recommendations. For example, if you prefer science-fiction movies, you might be able to discover ones you’ve probably never heard of, from other users. Trakt even lets you add friends and family to your contact list, so you can see what your close ones are watching. Trakt has a progress section where you can find an overview of your watch history, with the option to filter it down by year, rating or media type.
Goodreads.com is to books, what Trakt is to movies and TV shows. Goodreads is undoubtedly the most popular book recommendations and tracking service around. It was recently bought by Amazon and the website and app have seen major updates over the past years. It’s the largest database of books and a huge, active community of readers who constantly post reviews and recommendations. The site also has large discussion groups catering to different genres. The smartphone app has all the features accessible to you. Readers can mark the current position in a book by percentage or by page number. Goodreads knows exactly how many pages every book has, so it automatically marks your current location in the book. You can leave a written review or give a simple star rating when you complete a book. It also ties neatly with Facebook and other social media services so you can easily add friends, comment and like what they are currently reading. It’s also a good time to buy a Kindle Paperwhite, or the basic Kindle. These eBook readers have built-in support for Goodreads, and they can track your progress for you, even offer recommendations for books.
The Last.fm service is a music tracking service. It has been around for nearly two decades, so it has a library of all the brands, groups and genres in music. Last.fm is available as a smartphone app, and regardless of the music player you use, it can track every song and how many times you listen to it. The first thing it can offer you is recommendations, and you can also click on a specific song or album or artist to find other similar sounding songs or artists. there are leaderboards and charts not just for the best albums and tracks from specific artists but also listeners. You can find the biggest fan of your favorite band, then find other bands and songs you are likely to enjoy.
The service can also be used in collaboration with music players and plugins. So, you could be using Spotify and easily log into your last.fm account using it or if you are using a third-party music player like foobar on Windows, you could install a component to automatically post your music playback to the service. Recording your playback is called audioscrobbling and if you look up on your device’s app store for ‘last.fm scrobbler’, you should more than a few options.
Keeping a track of all the content we consume can help find more recommendations, but also know what we’ve already watched, heard or read. You will rarely ever come run into a situation where you’re 10 minutes into a movie or TV episode, when you realize you’ve already watched it before. These apps are also handy, depending on the service you use to listen to music. You could use a smart streaming device, smart speakers or smart TVs to play content, and still scrobble to Last.fm. To learn about more cool services in software keep visiting reliancedigital.in.
