Each month, Eugene Gordin contributes VolumeSessions, a column about music, digital world, and everything in between.

For a long time now, I have been disappointed with iTunes’ ability to keep track of my listening habits. Currently, iTunes logs playcounts, date added, and last played date for each song in your itunes library, but this kind of information is extremely limited.

For example, last summer I had a set playlist that I listened to at the gym, which forced all of the songs’ playcounts to skyrocket. Now when I look at my most played playlist, they are all pretty high up there, despite the fact that they are in no way my favorite songs. Although there are ways around this, I began searching some something more advanced, and I stumbled upon Last.fm’s Audioscrobbler iTunes plugin.

After installing the plugin (and entering your last.fm login information), all you see is a little music note in your menu bar, but behind the scenes, the plugin is logging all of the songs you play in iTunes to Last.fm, keeping track of not only how much you play a certain song (or artist), but also when. With this kind of information, Last.fm does a number of very interesting things:

• Creates weekly charts for any given week of the top artists, songs, or albums you listened to that week

• Tracks your overall top artists, songs, and albums

• Finds your musical “neighbors”: people that have listened to the music you listen to and have similar tastes

• Creates two different person radio stations for you, one that will recommend new music based on what you listened to, and one that takes songs from your “neighbors” that you haven’t listened to and plays them for you

• Lets others see what you are listening to and lets you see what others are listening to (even allows posting your recent track list in your xanga/blog/signature)

The site is pretty amazing, and has helped me find out about what ended up being some of my favorite music. Like all amazing things however, Last.fm is not without its limitations. In order to log the songs you play to Last.fm, you need to be online, which is a significant limitation for those traveling (supposedly offline “scrobbling” should work, but I have yet to see it as of the time of this posting). Also, though logging recently played songs on your ipod is possible, it is very buggy and rarely works (a fix for this is in the works).

Despite its limitations, Last.fm is a website with no parallels, mixing together elements of Pandora, Facebook, MySpace, and iTunes to provide its users with a kind of all encompassing technologically advanced music neighborhood. If you haven’t gotten a free account yet, I highly recommend it. And incidentally, both Mike and I are on it, so look us up :).

Eugene Gordin is the author of interesting finds, a blog about computer hardware, software, and technology in general. Views expressed in VolumeSessions are his own. Feedback is welcome at eugene_AT_gordin.net.