iTunes Skip Count
Monday 30 October 2006 - Filed under computers + mac + music
It’s been mentioned before, for example on Digg, but iTunes 7 has a new feature that counts the number of times you’ve skipped a track, which is defined as playing the song for at least two seconds but no longer than twenty (after which it is counted as played fully).
I’m curious how they chose twenty seconds as the cutoff – when I was working on an (unreleased and unfinished) project for generating smart shuffles, I defined skips as not listening past the first fifteen seconds, but didn’t count a full play until the song ended.
It’s an interesting feature, and it’s apparently kept up to date by some iPods, so I can see it helping me keep bad songs off my small iPod by using it in a smart playlist rule. However, often I find myself skipping songs I really like because I’m just not feeling them at the moment. So – how about the option of a smart playlist rule that lets me define a skip percentage? If I skip a song far more often than I play it, then it’s a pretty good bet I don’t need it on my iPod.
2006-10-30 » mike
9 March 2007 @ 11:59 am
The song isn’t counted as played unless you get to within the last 9 seconds. Skipping between 20 seconds in and 9 seconds from the end adds to neither tally.
2 July 2007 @ 6:45 pm
thats where skip count really plays in ;) I have my cut off at five times skipped, total. Have yet to tweak it, but it works lovely!
4 December 2007 @ 2:55 pm
just make 2 rules, skip count is _____ and play count is ungodly number of times listened
4 December 2007 @ 2:56 pm
err I mean less than ungodly amount of times listened.
23 January 2008 @ 12:49 am
i just looked at my skip count and found that because i’ve done nothing about it, two of my songs have reached 1536.
16 March 2009 @ 2:51 pm
Wait, so if I skip within the first 20 seconds, it doesn’t get a count? I will have to test this!!