Create album cover mosaic wallpapers with Last.fm Desktop Generator

Gijsco's Last.fm Desktop Generator is a cool application for music junkies. Here is what it does: it downloads data from your Last.fm profile and then creates a mosaic out of the covers of your favorite music albums and sets it as a wallpaper.

Actually, this program is capable of pulling music history data from any Last.fm user. Just enter a Last.fm username, click on Draw Image and create a mosaic of album covers. The mosaic can be saved as a single image for later use or directly applied as a wallpaper. The data source can either be the most recent albums a user listened to during the past week, month, 3 months, 6 month, a year are the overall music history of that user.

The program offers a surprising number of customization options despite it’s simple function. The options menu is neatly categorized into 3 sections – Pre-processing, Drawing and Post-processing.

The Pre-processing options allows you to filter the data which is retrieved from the Last.fm. For instance, you can choose to include certain albums into the result or exclude them, or use only those albums that were played for a specific number of times. You can also ‘boost the quality’ of the album cover images by instructing them to download higher resolution images.

The Drawing options enables you to add borders to the images or even include your own fake album covers. There are more drawing options under the Draw Image menu like generating mosaics with same album cover size, or random sizes or a single line of images with reflection and glassy effect.

The Post-processing options provides a handful of image filters like blur, desaturate and fade. The various options enables you to apply all kinds of effects and modification without having to import the image to another image editor.

A number of available command line switches enables you to create a schedule task to automatically generate a new wallpaper at any interval you desire.