Listens per day

Seeing this post, I realized that listens per day might be a better metric, and went about rewriting a mIRC addon for iTunes I was using to output this data.

Unfortunately I was predicting a switch to foobar2000 or Songbird in the near future, so the addon is still in beta and is not 100% functional (although it does the bare minimum of outputting the song, artist, total listens, LPD, etc.). A more in-depth discussion after the jump.

My original specifications called for the addon to not only calculate the LPD but use this value to rate the song in addition to several other metrics such as number of times skipped, etc. The drawback being the song’s rating would only update whenever you use the addon while listening to it. There is also the important fact that my rating of the song does not strongly correlate to how often I listen to it. I think Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major (Spring) is excellent, but I listen to it 0.1 times a day on average, versus a 1.6 LPD for Kawada Mami’s JOINT. In the end I discarded this idea as even compromises such as keeping track of the playlist was getting to be too much when I could just switch players and do a better job of it.

I have heard that Songbird and foobar have programmable columns which would make this process much easier and integrated, however I have not done any actual research on this and the feasibility considering my programming skills. Regardless, if I am able to create complicated column values whose stored values are externally accessible than I’m sure an automated rating system would be possible. (Oh wait, then I would not only have to program my foobar/Songbird, but rewrite whatever mIRC addon I’m using to display the custom values too – I’m really lazy dammit!). Either way, being able to sort by LPD or a custom algorithm would be really nice.

The actual implementation only outputs the LPD in addition to the usual data in the channel and does nothing to the iTunes rating. Another problem is that I have not fixed multibyte character handling. It uses the OS’s native codepage so when I tried to output stuff like Korean characters, they just displayed as question marks. Japanese characters did not fair that well either, as can be seen in Figure 1-1, where one of the names failed to convert. Probably won’t fix it any time soon.

Figure 1-1: Example of output.

Link to addon.

The addon was written for mIRC clients. Simply unzip the folder into your addons folder and it should work with /playmsg.

Update:

Apparently LPD has already been done for foobar! And even better, it seems to be a lot easier than the crap I had to go through trying to program that damn iTunes DLL! I guess its about time I switch primary media players…