Modify the threshold for playcount additions in iTunes?
December 29, 2010 6:57 AM   Subscribe

Anyone know of a workaround that would enable someone to modify the point at which a song is counted as "fully played" in iTunes?

I get impatient and often just skip to the next song when there are still several seconds left, so my playcounts don't really reflect the amount of time I've actually devoted to each song. So it would be great if I could set iTunes to increase a song's playcount when it still has several seconds to go. Any ideas?
posted by samac to Technology (7 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Learn to scrub the song to the end instead of clicking 'next'?

Jeez, that sounds very Steve Jobs-like: listen to it different!
posted by mazola at 7:27 AM on December 29, 2010


I'm not aware of any workaround.
And while this doesn't really answer your "increase a song's playcount" question... if you use Smart Playlists, I believe there is an option to keep track of "Skipped songs", and perhaps you can manipulate your playlists to keep track of skipped songs through that option?
posted by annekenstein at 7:36 AM on December 29, 2010


Doesn't really answer your question, but Songbird does this. Back when I used iTunes this really bugged me, so I'd always tug the song to the end to advance to the next track so it would count the song. In a fit of Jobs-can-have-my-money-when-he-pries-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands a few months ago, I purged my computer of all Apple and i[etc] products. And got Songbird. I haven't investigated it super-closely, but it appears to count a song as played when it's a certain percentage of the way through. (And it transfers your playcount from iTunes, which is nice.)
posted by phunniemee at 7:45 AM on December 29, 2010


You could write an AppleScript to increase the playcount of the current song by 1 and then skip to the next track, then assign that AppleScript a keyboard shortcut.

This blog post has a sample script you might find useful.
posted by bcwinters at 7:52 AM on December 29, 2010 [2 favorites]


It sort of depends on what your goals are, but if they are basically statistics, last.fm scrobbles at 50% of the song by default, and is configurable. (And also has much better views of the data than itunes, anyways.)
posted by advil at 8:55 AM on December 29, 2010


Another non-direct solution is to get a software add on like BPMer. This software will go through your itunes library, calculate the BPM for each song, and can also optimize start and stop times for each song (i..e. it will crop out the first/last few seconds of each song where nothing is playing). It comes with another software called Accubeatmix (which I love). It adds an checkbox in your itunes (like so) and when checked, it will beat match songs (that have a BPM) so listening to a playlist or album feels like a DJ is seamlessly mixing them.

Software is free to try but costs $19 and I can totally vouch for how cool it is.
posted by special-k at 10:07 AM on December 29, 2010


PS: Just to be clear, BPMer does not actually crop songs, it just adjusts the start and stop times which you can always undo at a future point in time. To be it sounds like you don't care for the intro and fade out and till plugin will let you avoid it.

From the site: BPMer is more than a mere BPM counter. It also detects intro & fade-out to skip them in iTunes. And thanks to AccuBeatMix, you just get perfect, beat-matching transitions.
posted by special-k at 10:15 AM on December 29, 2010


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