Recently Last.fm released a tech demo called Boffin (Slang for a scientist or other smart dude). The open source application gobbles down all your music, matches your songs with data from last.fm and then gives you a nice big tag cloud representing your music library.

Choose a few of these tags and Boffin will play a selection of music based on your tag choices. It shares a similar concept to iTune’s Genius minus all the “Genius is Unavailable for this song” suckage. In the end you’re essentially getting a local last.fm station.

Usually when software has to load a large number of files you are presented with a progress bar that seems to go on forever. Boffin went for something more unique and interesting. Photos of artists gently float across the player’s window as their songs are analyzed by last.fm. This is a wonderful way of decreasing the perception of loading time and keeping a user interested. Here’s 15 seconds of the analyzing experience to give you an idea:

Another neat little trick Boffin offers is the ability to turn your tag cloud into a wordle cloud. Here’s mine:

Boffin is, as stated by Last.fm a tech demo/eexperiment. They are looking for input on the software and also offer up the source code for the project. If you are interested in following along and having your say in how the software evolves check out this thread.

Last but not least, if you’re on a mac and finding the Boffin icon a little chunky, I recommend the red vinyl icon from this set.