How Long Until the Song is Played?
I utilize the heck out of the metadata produced and stored in iTunes. One of the prime factors in my Smart Playlists is “Play Count”: how many times a song has been played.
For example, if you’re looking at an entire album, and you see that a few songs have been played dozens of times, but more have been largely ignored, that can help you cull your library and either archive or delete some songs altogether.
But the Play Count doesn’t go up by one as soon as you hit the play button (unless you’re talking about a podcast, which have different rules applied to them). Likewise, you don’t have to listen to the entire song for the Play Count to get incremented. It happens somewhere in the middle.
I’ve been curious about this for a long time, mostly for selfish reasons. What with my brain configuration, I get bored with songs pretty quickly. If your song is Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Chorus Chorus, I’ve already tuned out by the end of the second Verse and generally skip to the next song. Unfortunately, the Play Count doesn’t increment when I Skip too quickly.
So I took a few minutes today and experimented. Incidentally, this was using iTunes 7.5.0.20.
| Song Length | Time before new Play Count | Percentage Listened |
|---|---|---|
| :31 | :20 | 65% |
| :60 | :50 | 83% |
| 2:03 | 1:53 | 92% |
| 3:00 | 2:50 | 94% |
It’s a sliding scale. And it’s going in the wrong direction, in my opinion. By the time I’ve heard 65% of your average three minute song, I’ve heard enough. iTunes shouldn’t be waiting for me to hear 94% of it. I sure hope this gets reversed, or at least, configurable.
Comments [4]
8 April 2008, 16:40
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You’re looking at the wrong figure (although I’m sure you already realize this). It seems that it changes the play count 10 seconds before the song ends, regardless of the length of the song.
— Darren R. Sussman 8 April 2008, 22:02 #
Huh. You’re probably right.
— Bryan 9 April 2008, 07:53 #
Even more fun: iPod uses different rules altogether. Play counts don’t get recorded until the song has completely ended.
But I have no problem with any of this. If the point of play counts is to show the number of times the song has been played, then it reasonably follows that iTunes would want to make sure you’ve listened to a very large portion of the song before it records it as a “play.”
— Jared Christensen 9 April 2008, 11:13 #
Now, see, I am more interested in the inverse (reverse?) of what you’re describing.
For me the question is, “How soon/late into the track can I hit [skip] and consider the song skipped?”
Many of my playlists depend on the “last skipped” date.
Oh good grief. This is gonna be a hella long comment. I’m going to just write (yet another) iTunes rant on my site.
— dvg 10 April 2008, 12:09 #