There’s a new program in town (for Mac users) to help you gather more nuggets of information about your listening habits as reflected by your iTunes library. it’s a nifty little piece of donation-ware called iTunes Statistician and it analyzes your library data to calculate your top 100 songs, artists, albums and genres, based on playcounts (and optionally weights for star rating as well). additionally, it calculates the total number of plays of all your songs and tells you how much total time you’ve spent listening to your music. It also tells you the average length of your songs (4:23 in my case) and average number of songs you play each day.
The program makes a pretty good desktop-based substitute to the ailing iTunes registry (which is looking to beef up its service, so kick in if you’ve got a few extra bucks). unfortunately, iTunes statistician only samples the entire library. the iTunes registry, on the other hand, allows you to submit any exported song list in XML format. In that regard, it is much more versatile. If you wanted to see the stats for all your 90s music, you’d simply create a smart playlist with condition year is between 1990 and 1999.
export song list from iTunes as XML and upload it to the registry for analysis.
However, until the registry is fully operational again, I’m certain that iTunes statistician will provide me with all the information I need.
I liked this iTunes/iPod stats thing on Facebook, “What’s on my iPod?” but I wanted to get the stats without having to upload my file all the time. So, I taught myself a little VB Script and wrote a rudimentary stats/metrics program. It basically spits out a bunch of numbers and lists to a date-stamped file and it takes about a minute to run for every 1,000 songs you have. For me, it takes just over 3 minutes to run on my aging home PC (with nearly 5,000 songs).
You can save it anywhere on your PC and double-click on it and it should run. You may need to have VB.NET installed, so you can go to the Microsoft Updates site for that. I am VERY interested in feedback on this, and I’d welcome enhancements to the script as well.
You can get information and download it at:
http://yanoff.org/music/iTunesStats.shtml
Cheers,
-Scott
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