AudioScrobbler, Episode I: VS iTunes
Thursday, January 6, 2005 » list music thought update
Recently the Palidor got me to start using AudioScrobbler, a plug-in that records your music listening habits and reports back to you with some potentially interesting data, like your most frequently-played artists and tracks. It also claims to be capable of linking you to people with similar musical taste, as well as recommending new artists to you, but it seems like they're still working the bugs out on that feature.
The reason I say the results are only mildly interesting is because, at the moment, it only looks at what you've listened to since installing the plug-in. It may have just been my data-freak side taking over, but when iTunes 3 came out back in 2002 and added features like song ratings and play count tracking, I felt robbed that they hadn't been available since the first version. (Actually, I felt robbed that I couldn't have had that feature built into my brain when I bought my first CD, but what can you do?) AudioScrobbler's lack of any sort of iTunes import option forces new [iTunes] users to start out with a blank slate all over again, and it's frustrating. Right now, AudioScrobbler says I've listened to 394 songs. According to iTunes, that number should be over 53,000. (And that's only since iTunes 3.)
The song and artist lists are also horribly inaccurate. Here are my current top artists and the number of their songs I've played, according to the Scrobbler:
- David Bowie, 41
- Kenichiro Fukui, 28
- Radiohead, 18
- Boards of Canada, 17
- The Beatles, 15
- Amon Tobin, 12
- Pixies, 11
- Bob Dylan, 9
- David Holmes / The Fiery Furnaces / Koichi Sugiyama (tied), 6
On a related note, I recently saw Ocean's Twelve and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Compare that to a top artists lists I put together by exporting my iTunes library and then fiddling with Microsoft Excel for a bit: (Warning: This is the part where it becomes less a critique of AudioScrobbler and more about satisfying my own unhealthy statistical fascination.)
- Hitoshi Sakimoto, 2340
- Nobuo Uematsu, 2077
- Pixies, 1466
- They Might Be Giants, 1348
- Yasunori Mitsuda, 1346
- Koji Kondo, 1162
- U2, 897
- David Bowie, 857
- R.E.M., 774
- The Beatles, 731
That's much less surprising. Now, I know the Scrobbler results are off because iTunes had a three-year head start, but what's their excuse for not adding an option to take advantage of the mountain of data in my iTunes library? It didn't take very long for me to come up with my own top 10 list, and I used Excel!
One of the major reasons I'm disappointed that AudioScrobbler won't look at my music library file is that it could provide some functionality that Apple is neglecting in iTunes. In addition to the charts on the personal user pages, AudioScrobbler keeps track of things like the top rising songs and artists among all users, and the top "non-movers," artists who occupy the same chart slot for long periods. It would be great if iTunes would track things like which artists were popular when, total time spent listening to artists, and so on. Unfortunately, the introduction of movie trailers playing through the iTunes Music Store and the iPod photo indicate Apple is moving iTunes in a different direction, away from the music-dedicated, stat-happy iTunes 3. Instead of putting so much effort into being a musical Friendster, AudioScrobbler could be picking up the slack.
Comments (2)
January 7, 2005, 9:37 AM
Kevin »
I can see how it could be frustrating not being able to import the old data but I think part of that has to do with the difference in the definition of "played" between the two. iTunes marks a song played pretty much if you open it and start playing, it doesn't care if you finish it or fast forward etc -- Audioscrobbler has set requirements (certian % of the song played, no fast forward, etc).
I recently blogged about AudioScrobbler and I love it -- I started using it not long after I started heavily using iTunes so for me the results are both very similiar.