Last.fm car radio testimonial / Feature Request

First I wanted to say thanks for a great program. I've actually been scrobbling from my windows mobile device for a while through "Pocket Player" but it's good to be able to do it through the built in WMP plus TCPMP now too.

The main reason I tried it out was to see if the radio actually worked. I tried it at work and it was actually playing the last.fm radio so that got me thinking if I could use it in the car.

To me getting the last.fm radio while in a car or on foot has been the last major leap for the radio. I can scrobble from any computer or from a mobile player, but the radio is only while I'm tethered at a computer or through a home stereo connected to the computer.

What I'm using is an HTC Hermes, running a cooked ROM (Schaps 4.31), over AT&T's 3G/HSPDS network, broadcast to an iTech bluetooth adapter, that is plugged to an FM transmitter, to the car radio. The phone->bluetooth adapter->fm adapter issue is because my headphone adapter for the HTC shorted out.

I tried out the radio on the way home from work and it worked! It's a 4 mile drive, 15 minutes long which I figured would be enough to see if the latency would be an issue hopping from one tower to another. I only had two problems:

First seems to be more related to the phone's processor doing bluetooth+radio streaming at the same time. The track would be fully buffered but I'd still get an occasional skip every 45sec to a minute of play time. When I tried to open task manager to see processor usage the stream stopped and the phone was almost frozen till I closed taskman (it pulls decent processor usage by itself). So I think as soon as my new headphone adapter arrives to take the bluetooth out of the equation that issue will be gone.

Second issue is that the song needs to buffer 10-20 seconds before it starts playing. It would be nice if it could be getting a headstart on that during the last 30 seconds of the previous track when the buffer for that track finished.

So my feature requests:

1. Pre-buffer the next track while the last track is playing (if possible).
2. I was only allowed to sign in to non-subscriber radios even after giving my login info. My "loved tracks" radio is the best on the net!! I want to listen to that in the car instead of global tags or similar artists. Bonus points given if all or at least the top 20 of my personal tag radios are available also.

Kerensky97 said:
What I'm using is an HTC Hermes, running a cooked ROM (Schaps 4.31), over AT&T's 3G/HSPDS network, broadcast to an iTech bluetooth adapter, that is plugged to an FM transmitter, to the car radio. The phone->bluetooth adapter->fm adapter issue is because my headphone adapter for the HTC shorted out.


Woah, that's about as geeky as it can get I'd say. :P
Though the thought to be able to scrobble the songs I listened to in my car is really appealing. Actually I'm just thinking about how it might be possible to get last.fm Mobile running on a Windows-based navigation device with an MP3-player and FM-transmitter included... XD