Mac::iTunes::Library

Though I use Last.fm it’s not a perfect representation of my listening habits. Between the occasional server downtime, not uncommon in the Audioscrobbler days, I wanted to be able to get some accurate statistics about my music library. It’s easy to create smart playlists to find the number of songs you have of each genre or by each artist in your library, but much more interesting is to see what you actually listen to the most. There are a number of artist whom I only have a limited collection of, but enjoy quite a lot. DJ Miko being a great example - 10th by number of tracks, but a strong 3rd by playcount. I just can’t get enough of those Eurodance beats. Conversely, Scooter is a prolific producer, but a long way from my favorite artist.

Genre-wise, I’ve got a lot of trance, but apparently end up listening to Ska more. Is that really true? Well, it is by playcount, but I should probably to a listing based upon playcount times song length; Trance tracks tend to be lengthy, especially if you count the numerous DJ mixes I have. By this same token, I’d venture a guess that the average song length of my library, 5 minutes 13 seconds is on the longer end of the spectrum. Finally, the ratio of songs to artists is a quite reflection of whether a library is represented by an encyclopedic collection for each artist (high ratio) or a schizophrenic mix of singles (lower ratio). I have no idea what an absolute scale for this number is, but I’d love to hear results from others.

Also, my library has grown quite a bit:

Number of tracks: 10737
Total size: 85605.68 MB         Average size: 7.97 MB
Total time: 38d 23h 3m 0s       Average time: 5m13s
Ratio of songs/artists: 4.576726342711


Most popular artists, by number of tracks:
        137     ATB
        118     Scooter
        116     blink-182
        115     Armin van Buuren
        111     Paul van Dyk

Most popular artists, by playcount:
        1585    blink-182
        1279    Goldfinger
        873     DJ Miko & Mini Me
        837     Less Than Jake
        753     Big D and the Kids Table

Most popular genres, by number of tracks:
        1627    Trance
        1219    Dance
        1073    Ska
        628     Rock
        583     Vocal Trance

Most popular genres, by playcount:
        8448    Ska
        6334    Dance
        5328    Trance
        2846    Punk
        2723    Rock

It’s certainly been a while since I started this project and the module that I spun off of it has been around for a good while. I’ve compiled the script into a PAR that should run without needing Perl or any modules on any 64 bit Mac OS X machine. From a terminal:

wget http://dinomite.net/2009/01/itunesstats
chmod +x itunesstats
./itunesstats ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml 5

If that doesn’t work for you, you can simply install Mac::iTunes::Library with CPAN; CPAN might require configuration but, except for mirror selection, the defaults will work:

$ sudo -H cpan -i Mac::iTunes::Library

With the module installed, you can download and run the example script.

Details on the code: The module allows you to parse the iTunes XML library which is generated by iTunes every time the library changes. iTunes itself uses a binary file to manage your music and the XML is only generated as a courtesy. Thus, my module can represent a library and the items within it in full, but I only have a parser for the XML and provide no way of emitting a new XML library. brian d foy has a module that is able to parse the binary iTunes - as long as it’s version 4.5. For the uninformed, we’re on iTunes 8 these days. Updating that module might be my next project.