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.
Whilst a lot of these things are possible to do (like writing a daemon that logs more iTunes information to a DB) unless iTunes actually does this itself, these kind of features will never really permeate the market much, and hence will limit it’s usefulness to be fairly niche market.
1 hour, 16 minutes after the fact.
You could also write an iTunes plugin that causes your daemon to start up whenever iTunes does, which would make it pretty painless to keep the two in sync.
3 hours, 18 minutes after the fact.
@Adrian: I’ll just point you towards The Long Tail, which deals with the idea that niche markets can be profitable under the right circumstances. I’m not saying I’m on the right track, but you never know…
besides, it would be mostly for my own interest anyway.
@Bob: I’ve no idea if this is easy to do. Sounds like it should be. I’ll have to look into it.
2 days, 3 hours after the fact.
When will this be available? I am in need of a script that will find the most often played songs in a given week. This sounds like it would be a start in the right direction. I haven’t been able to find anything so I’m going to start writing my own applescript unless you have any suggestions.
-Adam
1 year after the fact.
I never even started this. If you have any issues getting the data, and the info in other parts of this blog doesn’t help, I’m more than happy to help you out.
1 year after the fact.
Is this “>the script doing something similar to what you want to do?
1 year after the fact.