Last year at this time I posted about how it is possible to analyze your iTunes library and generate some statistics about it. Well, another year has come and gone and I have been listening lots to my iPod Touch. I have discovered and rediscovered a ton of great music and love how iTunes helps me to organize my hobby.
I use two different programs to run the statistics. The most polished one is called SuperAnalzyer and it creates some wonderful statistics and graphs.
The other program is a fabulous little script written by Scott Yanff.
iTunes Statistics Text Document
These statistics were taken late December 26, 2010 of my personal library. It is a snapshot of a year of iTunes use and listening. After listening to a song a couple of times I will assign a rating to it. Some changes of note:
- 12,626 songs has grown to 21,108 songs with over 8,400 songs being added to the library. This is kinda a slow down mostly because I had imported most of my CD collection in the previous year. I have also begun purchasing albums and songs through iTunes so the physical CD collecting is going to slow down even further which will make my wife happy. 😉
- 783 artists has grown to 1,737 artists
- 815 albums has grown to 1,341 albums
- I have noticed that I have become more forgiving in the rating of the music I listen to, since I started with iTunes. I started off being highly critical and deciding whether a song was worthy of being a 5 star based on some kind of criteria. I have now have realized that it all comes down to what extent a song moves me.
- I have dabbled with some Jazz, Blues, and Country music which has given me increased appreciation for those genres.
- I have verified that my favorite music genre is the New Wave era of the 1970s & 1980s. The music from that era has spiked that number of five star and four star songs by a large amount (252 song up from 84 and 2,364 from 595 respectively). There was so much great stuff then! 🙂
Thanks for the reference! I hadn’t see SuperAnalyzer. I like the graphs although I also like the balance with my script’s numbers. I’d be interested in knowing how long each program takes to run on your computer. Anyway, I have been inspired by the output of SuperAnalyzer to perhaps add some of those metrics into my iTunesStats script.
Cheers,
-Scott
@ Scott – My pleasure. I can’t remember very well, but I am thinking they took about the same length of time to do.
You will notice that the two programs focus on different aspects. Yours is more track & album focused while SuperAnalyzer is more about the entire library. I would not want you to lose your unique take on analyzing iTunes.
Finally, a public request that you incorporate some statistics related to rated music such as # of plays for each star rating, which artists and albums are the highest rated, etc. Thanks so much!
Hi, Christopher:
I did a fairly decent amount of updating of the script recently so please visit http://www.iTunesStats.com and grab the latest copy and let me know what you think. I loved reading the output of the script when you ran it against your library. There’s some voyeuristic pleasure in examining another person’s listening habits. Just to be fair, anyone can have a look at my recent metrics at: https://www.yanoff.org/music/iTunesStats.txt
Cheers,
-Scott