Apple iTunes skip and play counts explained
A of iTunes 7 (download here), music aficionados and meta-data junkies have been able to track the Skip Count of the songs in their music library. This data complements the ages-old Play Count statistic.
Along with the skip and play counts, iTunes records the last time a user played or skipped a song (this is useful if you want to know when you listen to music most during the day/week/month, or if you want to know when you’re most choosy about your music).
What, then, merits a Skip or a Play?
Using iTunes 8.02 on OS X 10.4, I set out to find out exactly how to (and how not to) get iTunes to increment the skip and play counts on a song. You can’t manually change these counts in iTunes unless you resort to changing the iTunes library xml file, or if you use one of Doug’s Applescripts. If you prefer not to cheat, and beat iTunes at its own game, here’s how:
- The play count is incremented by 1 if the song is completed, or if the track timer is within 10 seconds of the end of the track when the Forward command is sent.
- The skip count is incremented by 1 if the track timer is between 2 and 20 seconds when the Forward command is sent.
- The two above rules apply whether the song is playing or paused.
- iTunes doesn’t care how you got the progress in the track: listening to the first 21 seconds is the same as manually moving the timer to 0:24. This means you can easily get play counts on songs by placing the timer within 10 second of the song’s finish, then hitting Forward.
- Play counts take precedence over skip counts. This means you will never get a nonzero skip count for any track of duration less than 12 seconds.
I assume the rules are the same for other versions of iTunes, and for playback on iPods (I’ve heard iPod firmware needs to have been updated sometime since september 2006, and it won’t work in very old iPods). Now go out and get some sweet play/skip data!