davidgagne.net

You’re asking me, “What are the ten songs you played the most in iTunes this year, David?” Unfortunately I’m not going to tell you that. I’d love to do it, but I can’t. See, the thing is that iTunes doesn’t store meta data in a true RDBMS; it’s just a flat XML file. There’s no way to determine which songs you’ve listened to the most in the last X number of days. In order to do that you’d have to be able to cross-reference the time you heard each song as a separate data point. iTunes only stores the timestamp of the most-recent instance of listening to a song. Bummer.

But I can tell you which songs I added to iTunes in 2006 that I heard the most. And I know you want to know that. And — because I love flirting with disaster — I can also let you download an mp3 of each one. Shhh! Don’t tell the RIAA!

The Ten Songs I Added to iTunes in 2006
(That I Heard the Most This Year)

Tip: Right-click and choose “Save As …”

1. Mi Fido Di Te – Jovanotti
2. The Dirty Glass – Dropkick Murphys
3. Maps – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4. When You Were Young – The Killers
5. Bonnie Brae – The Twilight Singers
6. Where’d You Go? – Fort Minor
7. what will they do – becky
8. Everybody Wants You – Billy Squier
9. Symphony No. 9 (Scherzo) – Beethoven
10. Read My Mind – The Killers

Notes:

• I posted this prior to seeing a very similar post at kottke’s site.
• Like Kottke, I, too, use last.fm‘s audioscrobbler plugin to track my tracks. My problem is that I often listen to iTunes via my iPod and last.fm doesn’t keep track of those spins. Their database also seems to be wildly mistaken when it comes to which songs I’m hearing. I think it’s a nice service — I use it to display my “recently heard” songs in the sidebar on the front page — but I just know that a bunch of their statistics are incorrect for me.