2006.10.23

iTunes statistics, or a lack thereof

Posted in Music, Technology at 8:51 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel

I’ve just spent enough time googling for pre-made iTunes statistics programs to discover that there really aren’t any. Yes, there are a few out there, but none of them do what I’m looking for.

I already use last.fm to track how many times I play my tracks (since it tracks correctly whether I’m streaming my music or playing it from the host computer), but I’d like to see things like a graph of track distribution per genre, how many songs contain foreign language vocals, and so on.

I use (and abuse) my metadata for iTunes extensively, and all of it is sitting there in a giant XML file waiting to be data mined. I wonder how many (or how few) XPath queries I have to write to get this information? It can’t be all that difficult. Maybe there’s an app here…