Combo station urls

In this blog post I'll tell you how to create Last.fm combo station urls. Last.fm station urls always start with "lastfm://". For combo station urls, an example might look like

lastfm://rql/dGFnOnBvcCBub3Qgc2ltYXJ0OiJMYWR5IEdhZ2Ei

See that long character string after rql/ ? That is just simple Base64 encoding and RQL means "Radio Query Language". If you'd use a decoder like this one,it will decode to

tag:pop not simart:"Lady Gaga"

So, there are key-value pairs and logical connectors (valid ones are 'and', 'or' and 'not'). The above query means "play everything in direction of 'pop' tag, but not Lady Gaga's similiar artists". I think you got the idea...
The point I did not mention yet is that there are some nice options available. Let's change our query a bit:

tag:pop not simart:"Lady Gaga" opt:mainstr|0.55 opt:rep|0.6 opt:discovery|true

Huh? Lots of opt(ions)! mainstr stands for "Maintream", where the value range is from 0-1(0% to 100%). The less the value, the more unknown artists will occur in your station. Same goes for rep(etition), but in this case you can control the artist(or track?) repetition rate. I think "discovery" is kind of self-explanatory(discovery mode on/off). Here you got a nice table with names, values and descriptions:

Name	Value	Description
user	[username]	personal station
library	[username]	a users library
loved	[username]	loved tracks of user. After Nov 17 2010 this station is not available anymore!
rec	[username]	recommendations for a user
neigh	[username]	neighbour radio of user
ptag	[tag of user]|[username]	Personal tag radio of a user. The '|' is NO or!. After Nov 17 2010 this station is not available anymore!
playlist	[playlist-id]	A playlist station. Use user.getPlaylist API call to get playlist id's of a user's playlist. After Nov 17 2010 this station is not available anymore!
adv	[username]	Play a user's mix radio.
simart	"[artist name]"	Similiar artists of an artist. Keep the quotes around.
tag	[tag]	Global tag radio
group	"Group Name" or [groupid]	Group radio
opt:rep|	[0-1](default: 0.5)	Specifies the track repetition, means how long it will take until the track is played again
opt:mainstr|	[0-1] (default: 0.5)	Type of tracks played(obscure to popular)
opt:discovery|	[true|false] (default: false)	Discovery mode on/off

Note that the options are all optional and thus have a default value. Connect name and value with a ':', except for the opt: values. If a value contains a space, it must be enclosed with double-quotes(""). Known Issues

• Discovery mode is subscribers only.
• In the Base64 RFC specification there is a space after 76 characters in the encoded string. Apparently the web and the desktop client cannot handle this space, so you have to remove it and everything will work fine.

Have fun with constructing the urls and implementing it in your app!
Very much thanks to Norman (nova77LF)(glorious creator of the Radio Query Language) for clarification on some points :)