Friday, July 22nd, 2005, 3:22 pm
Logging Music
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Spreadsheet representation of music history (click to enlarge)
ome weeks ago I wrote about an XMMS extension that I had devised. This collection of steps which I described could make XMMS store simple log files for music (music ‘history’). That work has now been thoroughly extended to produce spreadsheets (comma-separated values (CSV) to be precise) rather than flat log files.
In brief, what is obtained using this trick are music history logs, one file for each day. Each file contains full, detailed history of the tracks listened to. Interesting information can be derived from these, e.g. most frequently played tracks, tracks quickly skipped (implying the possibility of deletion or removal from playlist). As already said in last entry:
A music log file results in even more redundant data to store. According to a rough calculations, I will see it growing by 1 megabyte every month or so. Compression, however, should make it only 10-20% of its original size.
You can find all the details on this work (installation instructions included) in my Linux Utilities page.
