Hey folks, I guess I won’t bother giving a huge update on all the stuff that has happened between May (my last post) and now. The basics are that I graduated, moved to Edinburgh and have started working. 
All in all everything is great with me, but while Matt has been working away on his own stuff for a while now, I’ve been left feeling I don’t have a lot to do. Obviously I have still been playing “Animal Crossing” (it’s the Acorn Festival this week!!) and I have been doing a bit of reading “The Boleyn Inheritance” by Philipa Gregory. I strongly urge anyone who likes historical novels to give Gregory a try – however with one warning, don’t start with “The Boleyn Inheritance” it’s definitely not the best book she’s written. “The Other Boleyn Girl” is a prequel written about Anne Boleyn and (her lesser-known sister) Mary’s rise and fall in the court of Henry the 6th, it is a much much better written book and is such a heart wrenching tale. I would also read it before the film comes out, starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johanson.
Also just remembered went to the last McFly concert last week through in Glasgow, which was also not as good as previous concerts, but good all the same. Watch out for “Star Girl” it unfortunately gets stuck in your head!!!
Anyway back to my lack of things to do, because I am working but still have a fair amount of time on my hands has really given me time to think about the sort of stuff I want to develop for myself. Its something I have never spent time on myself, I have never written a piece of code that wasn’t for an assignment, for a grade on a piece of paper. Although I don’t think is particularly a problem for me, how much could it hurt to try? I spent a bit of time thinking about what I could do.
- I could spend the time improving this website, but what for? I barely ever write posts! As you may have noticed…
- I could do nothing in particular but write code that helps me learn the new technologies at work
But all that to me sounds a little pointless, I know I would never do something unless I had something personal invested in it. I finally started with an idea I’ve had since I first got my iBook back in May.
When I converted to the Mac I lost a few things that I do actually miss, the biggest of which being my iTunes play count.
I guess this will need some explaining, ever since I have had a digital music player, the first being Windows Media Player. I have always been a big fan of keeping track of what my fave tunes were, based on the undisputable facts of a play count. I used to spend hours (this is unfortunately true) rearranging the tracks in my fave playlists manually so that the tracks were in order of highest play count.
One of the main reasons I switched to iTunes was the fact that by a single click I could reorder any playlist by play count order. However by switching my digital music player to iTunes on Windows I lost all that precious play count information – years of work!!!!
In May when I transferred my music collection from iTunes (Windows) to iTunes (Mac) I was dismayed that again I had lost all this information. It seems to me that this problem doesn’t need to be a problem at all, as I can write code that solves this myself!
It is this problem that I aim to solve. The ability to transfer play count data between the two platforms of iTunes.
If there is an already an easy way to solve this then feel free to post a comment and let me know, but to me this is a great project that I will work on irregardless. Making a wee bit of progress each day makes me feel, so far, that I haven’t wasted my non working hours.
Maybe one day when I finish this project I’ll put up and let folks look at it. Decided that the nature of the idea, being a port of content between Windows and Mac, that I would do it in Java and make it a bit more generic.
See you around folks, for once I make no apologies about the geek content of my post…
Lauren xx
I haven’t tried importing yet, but if you go to File->Export Library… in iTunes it gives you the option to export your library as XML. The resulting file does contain play counts. Like I say, I haven’t tried to then import it to see if it uses it (I imagine it would). If it doesn’t, it gives you a fairly simple data-source to start with. Hope that helps.
Yup the iTunes XML file is the way to go, it’s in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library or somewhere. I actually played a bit on writing a small app that’d go through the library and count up your playcounts for each artist so you’d know which artists you listen to most. It’s a fairly sensible XML file, not hard to write a parser for and yes you can edit it.
Sounds like it’d be a useful app, I too hate when I lose my play counts as I use them extensively in play lists.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/03/itunes.html is an article on it though it’s quite likely out of date.
Good luck!
I’ve also been annoyed in the past by losing my play counts, not having them shared between Linux and Windows being my main gripe. This doesn’t solve the problem, but a website I like a lot is last.fm. It stores play counts for you (and groups by artist) and lets you see what you’ve been listening to.
Hey thanks guys,
The xml file is definitely the way to go at the moment I have code that reads the file in and stores some of the useful information, not too difficult but definitely a good start!
Gary: Yeah I think import and export functions would’ve helped if I had done that straight away, but now I have play counts on both iTunes that I don’t want to lose! So I’m aiming to add them together instead.
Neil: Yeah it’s not a bad xml file, had some problems with it and Java’s DOM parser, but think I have managed to get round that now. Thanks for the article I think it’s mostly up-to-date but there are some new things that iTunes keeps track of now, like Skip Count.
Steven: last.fm is a very pretty site! I think I may have a more in depth look at that soon.
Thanks again for all the comments,
Lxx
I wish there was a way to transfer play counts from last.fm to your pc….itunes..