How can I get a list of "most played songs in the last month"?

January 30, 2011 11:59 AM

How can I get my Mac to tell me what music I've played most in the last month? iTunes seems to only record total play count. I don't want to publish a record of my listening to an online service such as last.fm. OS X 10.6; iTunes 10.
posted by nowonmai to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Make a new smart playlist, and select the parameters as follows:

Last Played
is in the last
30/31 days

…unless, of course, you want it *just* for this month, in which case you can set the specific date range using the 'is in the range' option.
posted by jaffacakerhubarb at 12:02 PM on January 30, 2011

Gah, that'll teach me to skimread. Do what I said, but also select the option 'most often played' underneath the individual parameters.
posted by jaffacakerhubarb at 12:04 PM on January 30, 2011

Response by poster: This just gives me a list of songs that were played in the last month, limited to a certain number on the basis of their all-time play count. Am I missing something?
posted by nowonmai at 12:48 PM on January 30, 2011

iTunes only records last played time and play count. Unless an intermediate logger program like Last.fm is used for every play (and I know you don't want that), you can't do what you're asking.

(I found this out part way through writing a web application that correlation iPod plays with GPS tracks. If you play the same song more than once, the iPod only remembers the time of the most recent one.)
posted by scruss at 12:59 PM on January 30, 2011

FWIW, I tried to do the same thing with smart playlists on iTunes, and couldn't. I went with last.fm. You can choose not to display any information publicly on last.fm, but if you just don't want a third party involved at all, I don't know of a solution.
posted by MadamM at 1:00 PM on January 30, 2011

I know you said no to last.fm, but depending on what your particular objection to last.fm is there are a couple of other options. There is a free (as in freedom) alternative to last.fm called libre.fm, it's still online but your data is not at the mercy of some faceless corporation.

Your other option is also libre.fm but, because it is open source, you can download the source code and run it on your own server. You could even run it on localhost - just hack your hosts file and any last.fm compatible scrobbler should work.
posted by robertc at 1:49 PM on January 30, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks for the info about libre.fm. I decided to set up scrobbling to a libre.fm account created with a throwaway email address for a privacy-through-obscurity effect, and discovered that libre.fm's stats breakdown doesn't (yet) have a monthly breakdown. In the process, however, I discovered that iScrobbler, an unofficial last.fm submission client, has a "Local Charts" feature! By installing iScrobbler and adding the line:
127.0.0.1 post.audioscrobbler.com
to my /etc/hosts file I am now able to get play counts by Artist or by Album for assorted time periods (including both Past Month and Month-to-Date) plus a page of other stats. The menubar item for iScrobbler turns red with rage at not being able to complete its scrobbles, but it doesn't spam Growl with error messages or anything.
iScrobbler is no longer being developed, as far as I can tell, so this could all stop working at any time. I'm still looking for a less kludgy solution if anyone has one!
posted by nowonmai at 2:55 AM on January 31, 2011