I’ve rewritten most of iTunes Library Checker to use some neater import code, it should also be a bit faster. Not quite complete yet, but close to the previous functionality.
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Monday, July 18th, 2005
Daily Archive
Mon 18th Jul 2005
Simpler iTunes Library Checker
Posted in the evening, filed under Languages , iTunes.I came across an interesting question today: Why doesn’t iTunes store all of the data about each time a song is played? And also, how much of the song was played?
It should be easy to write a daemon that monitors iTunes, and writes this data to a database. This database can then be cross-referenced against the iTunes database for a comprehensive breakdown of when songs are played. You can then find all of the songs that you listen to at a certain time of day, or season, and so on. You can also have a ‘how-often-played’, but cross referencing the Date Added attribute with the Play Count and so on.
I’ve already started to write this program, but it will likely be MacOS X only.
I got a comment to a post that had nothing to do with iTunes. Whilst it wasn’t a particularly helpful or nice comment, I thought maybe I can answer the question I think he’s asking.
(Unless he’s talking about the iTunes Music Store counter that shows how many songs have been bought for the latest contest…).
Wach time you finish playing a song, the Play Count field is incremented, and the Last Played date is updated. If you skip a song before listening to the entire track, neither of these are updated. There are some scripts around for MacOS AppleScript that will update a Play Count and Last Played if you listen to more than a certain amount of a track. I could also add the same feature to iTunes Rater. But I don’t really use Play Count and Last Played that often, anyway.