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iPod Irrational Fear of Playcounts

wrldwzrd89

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Original poster
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
Yeah, I know it sounds weird...

Anyway, when I want to play one song in my iTunes library over and over, I use QuickTime Player instead, just so I don't increment the playcount. I use playlist purely for grouping things, rather than sequencing the order that songs play.

How do I get over this?
 
I only ever display Name, Time and Artist because it looks neater IMO. Definitely hide the Play Count column. Ignorance is bliss. As is my 'tar...
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
Yeah, I know it sounds weird...

Anyway, when I want to play one song in my iTunes library over and over, I use QuickTime Player instead, just so I don't increment the playcount. I use playlist purely for grouping things, rather than sequencing the order that songs play.

How do I get over this?
Click to expand...

Hmm...in that case, you would not like to see the play counts for some of my songs. :) ;)
 
simple solution. . .

select all of your songs (command-a)
right click (or control-click for those one button people out there)
select "Reset Play Count"

or just hide the play count column. but i like to see my play count. i found it funny when i got a mac and started using iTunes all the time. . . all the songs on my "make-out" playlist made the top play count! Now (after averaging 3 years of music play) the top are songs i like the most, but still mixed in with some from that list!
 
wPod said:
. . . all the songs on my "make-out" playlist made the top play count!
Click to expand...
Your wet pillow and Olivia Newton-John album cover thanks you. ;) :D
 
I'm quite the opposite! I can't stand when my play counts aren't accurate. I'm sitting here at work with all my music on my PC here but I have to listen to everything through my iPod as I can't bear to think that the iTunes Library on my Mac wouldn't be exactly accurate with how many times I've listened to a song!

I use play counts heavily for Smart Playlists so they are very important to me. Playlists like "Songs with Play Count > 30 that haven't been played in the last 30 days" are usually top notch for just sticking on and listening to.
 
Playcounts are incredibly important to me. Couldn't do without them.

It was a moment for a screenshot when my top song reached 700 plays last night.
 

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thequicksilver said:
It was a moment for a screenshot when my top song reached 700 plays last night.
Click to expand...

Ooh, good song. I couldn't find out what that was called after see/hearing it in Human Traffic, and then the other day I had my iTunes library set on random,and it came on. It turned out I already had it on one of those free CDs that come in the newspaper, but had never known the name. I'm a happy girl. :)
 
I really like playcount info, it's something I always wanted to have when listening to records/CDs. Though mine tends to get biased towards workout playlists and music I practice along to.
 
thequicksilver said:
Playcounts are incredibly important to me. Couldn't do without them.

It was a moment for a screenshot when my top song reached 700 plays last night.
Click to expand...

Very nice, none of mine are that high (yet). :)
 
thequicksilver said:
Playcounts are incredibly important to me. Couldn't do without them.

It was a moment for a screenshot when my top song reached 700 plays last night.
Click to expand...

Wow thats a lot of plays. How long have you had the song for?

My highest playcount is only 54. I don't often listen to the same song over and over again.
 
I don't get caught up by playcounts but I used to get bothered by 'Last Played'

I had a playlist with songs I hadn't heard in 2-3 months but then I became alarmed at how many ended up in there at times so I'd find myself listening to that just to get it down to a couple of hundred rather than a couple of thousand. I think I'm over it now - stopped doing it when the Smart Playlist on the iPod stopped updating themselves and it became annoying.
 
Thanks everyone, I'll try those things.

While we're on the topic of play counts, anyone know why it's impossible to set the date last played to not available if you use the reset play count option to set the play counts for songs to 0? The best I can do is use a script I found on the Internet to set the play count to 0 and the date last played to a date well into the past for selected songs.
 
Lau said:
Ooh, good song. I couldn't find out what that was called after see/hearing it in Human Traffic, and then the other day I had my iTunes library set on random,and it came on. It turned out I already had it on one of those free CDs that come in the newspaper, but had never known the name. I'm a happy girl. :)
Click to expand...

It was used really well in Human Traffic, kind of made up for the film having absolutely zero plot. :) I could pretend I end up having it come on randomly all the time, but with a count of 700 I'm not sure it'd pass as being truthful…

For those who asked, I've had Belfast on my iBook since Jan 2004, so it's a lot of plays in a relatively short period, it's somewhere around 1.2 plays per day. In my defence, I have music on all the time that I'm at my computer, and on my iPod when I'm out and not with friends. I should also point out that it's also, in my opinion, the greatest song in the history of the world ever. :D

My playcounts are therefore absurdly high. Second place has 629, third 439, fourth 408, fifth 396, all the way down to 25th with 184.

I did say they were absurdly high…
 
thequicksilver said:
It was used really well in Human Traffic, kind of made up for the film having absolutely zero plot. :) I could pretend I end up having it come on randomly all the time, but with a count of 700 I'm not sure it'd pass as being truthful…

For those who asked, I've had Belfast on my iBook since Jan 2004, so it's a lot of plays in a relatively short period, it's somewhere around 1.2 plays per day. In my defence, I have music on all the time that I'm at my computer, and on my iPod when I'm out and not with friends. I should also point out that it's also, in my opinion, the greatest song in the history of the world ever. :D

My playcounts are therefore absurdly high. Second place has 629, third 439, fourth 408, fifth 396, all the way down to 25th with 184.

I did say they were absurdly high…
Click to expand...
That's impressive...I should analyze my playcounts someday. Fortunately, I've already set up some smart playlists expressly for this purpose, so all I need to do is check them.
 
Playcounts didn't really bother me up until a few months ago.

I've been organising my library for ages, getting everything rated, album & artist all correct etc but then I started reimporting music at a higher quality and I lost a good chunk of song playcounts. I thought, "Nah, its not a problem", but it really bothered me. It frigged up my smart playlists.

I've managed to reimport everything I wanted to, and with the help of the "New playcount script" from Doug's scripts, I have most of it as it should be before I started messing it up :p Just guessing randomly, "34" ... "Oh, don't like that one, must be low"

OCD checking Playcounts and Ratings ... Not good :rolleyes: It feels good having it all organised though.

Better go backup!
 
I'm definitely a playcount whore, I think they're one of the most useful features in iTunes. My most played songs aren't absurdly high because I get really bored listening to the same songs over and over, but I do get pissed off when my playcounts are zero. That just means I have to drop everything and listen to the song.

Since I have over five thousand songs in my library, it's fun to see which ones I've listened to a lot and which ones I haven't. Sorting by playcount and going through to see top-represented bands is a great waste of time!
 
iDM said:
i was pissed about losing my playcount actually I had to rip my iPod back to my Pb when i formatted my drive so i lost all of my play counts so that kinda stinks
Click to expand...

AAAAAAHHH me too sorta, but its my new imac, all my songs that i listened to are on my PB and when i transfered them over i lost all the playcounts.... :( as you can tell this stat is very importatnt to me i couldn't live without it, it actually obsesses me, if i only listen to more than ten seconds of a song, instead of changing it i will drag the marker to the end just so it counts as played.... :eek:
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
Yeah, I know it sounds weird...

Anyway, when I want to play one song in my iTunes library over and over, I use QuickTime Player instead, just so I don't increment the playcount. I use playlist purely for grouping things, rather than sequencing the order that songs play.

How do I get over this?
Click to expand...

use winamp
 
thequicksilver said:
It was used really well in Human Traffic, kind of made up for the film having absolutely zero plot. :) I could pretend I end up having it come on randomly all the time, but with a count of 700 I'm not sure it'd pass as being truthful…

For those who asked, I've had Belfast on my iBook since Jan 2004, so it's a lot of plays in a relatively short period, it's somewhere around 1.2 plays per day. In my defence, I have music on all the time that I'm at my computer, and on my iPod when I'm out and not with friends. I should also point out that it's also, in my opinion, the greatest song in the history of the world ever. :D

My playcounts are therefore absurdly high. Second place has 629, third 439, fourth 408, fifth 396, all the way down to 25th with 184.

I did say they were absurdly high…
Click to expand...

WOW!!! I got my iPod in Jan 04 and my top song has a play count of about 175! So that is insanely crazy to a have playcount of 700!!!

I am completely obsessed with my playcont on my iPod. I rarely listen to music on my iBook so I dont care about that one. But I basically listen to songs that I want to get a high playcount instead of listening to music that I'm in the mood to hear.Usally I'll just use the trick of skipping to the end of the song, or skipping the song before the end depending if I want the song to get more plays or not.

I remember "keeping" Autobiography by Ashlee Simpson out of number 1 by listening to the song in second place even when I really didnt want to hear it. But now Ashlee has fallen to 10th and almost out of the top 10 completely. By the way Harder to Breathe by Maroon 5 is my number 1, and I'm ok with that. I'm planning on getting a video iPod really soon and I think I will put all my playcount numbers for all 555 songs of mine in an excel document just so I won't lose them in the transfer. Thats how obsessed I am!!!

Oh, and if anyone knows of a script out that thats adds up the total playcount of an Album or Artist or Playlist that would be sweet cause I do it manually every month (only for 20 albums) just to see what albums are on top. Its really a pain especially since one of my albums has 66 songs on it (Ultimate Edition of The Phantom Menace Soundtrack) which by the way is my top played album by a long long shot. Well, if anyone else is as obsessed as I am and knows about scripts that will catalog the playcount in more ways plz tell me!
 
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