Fluorescent Dreams Wax Cylinders - Least recently-played song...

In my defense, this is a new computer, and it doesn't know what my least played song is...

And in my prosecution, I still have music that I've never listened to at least once. It's there kinda in a just in case thing. Almost all religious music falls into this category.

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I changed hard drives ten months ago...

...and I noticed 10 songs that I still haven't played since that transfer.

I've pushed those unplayed songs to the front of the line.

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Same here, iTunes killed the library file last fall, so doesn't have play dates for most of my music.

Also, I usually use streaming services.

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I screwed up... :<

I meant to click on "More than 3 years ago," but somehow ended up with "Between 2 and 3," and there are at least a hundred songs in that category. Earliest one is 10/31/03.

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You can change your answer.

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I don't know how well itunes/ipods have been recording this information since the beginning -- because I tend to doubt some of this info. (I've had an ipod since 2001/2002-ish, a first gen, and then upgraded to a second gen ipod not long later.)

About 1/4 or 1/5 of my songs have no last played date. My earliest is 14 Aug 02. Then 25 Oct 02. Then two more in 2002. Then 8 in 2003. Then the number in 2004 becomes too large to count -- hundreds. But I have 4747 songs total. And I don't listen except when I travel, or use the exercise bike (which hasn't been in a long time). Except for some play lists, and slowly marking songs I like with 4/5 stars (to make instant favorite playlists), I usually just put it on random and skip the songs I'm not in the mood for.

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I have two songs that the last time they were played was 09 Jun 2005... two days after I started ripping all my CDs into digital files. But those are only one star songs, so I'm not that worried.

By the way, I kinda obsess over not playing songs in a timely manner, so I mostly play from playlists that have a play count and/or not played in (x weeks) limiter. I try to play all my 2 star or higher songs in a 17 week rotation (it used to be 3 months, but I couldn't quite get to all of them consistently....)

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On playing songs...

I don't obsess over playing all songs, but I have an (overly complicated) set of playlists that makes sure that I play my least-recently played songs of each number of stars (and so that what I play tends toward 4-star and 5-star songs, with just a few 1-star songs).

My rotations tend to be long, with a 1-month rotation on my favorites... and an 8-month rotation on my 2-star songs. (1-star songs don't quite count; they're the ones I'm deciding whether to keep or toss.)

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My answer (12-18 months) is artificially low. I'm at work, and I've only been at this job for 15 months.

Of course, it's still longer than it would be if I answered this at home, because I bought a new computer about 9 months ago, and the move reset all the iTunes library data.

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"Least recently played" says 9/30/06; like some of the other commenters, I think some of those marked as "never played" are wrong. Well, OK, maybe some of those played on the iPod but not on the computer--would that affect it?

Stupid question maybe, but it hadn't occurred to me before: how do you set it up to play those songs more frequently?

FWIW, current song-count on mine is 12,390--though I think that includes a few audiobooks that refuse to go away--so playing them all through will take a while in any case.

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I'm surprised how many people seem to have a disassociation between what's in iTunes and their iPod. It is possible to manually manage the songs on the iPod, but it should still update the play count and last played information the next time it is synched to the computer.

There are a lot of ways to increase the frequency of when something is played. The higher the rating, the more likely it will be played. For songs that haven't been played yet, I have a couple ways of taking care of that. One is set up an automatic playlist where all members have a play count of zero. I also have an automatic playlist where the members all haven't played in the last 17 weeks.

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You can set up an automatic play list in iTunes? I should start looking into features. I haven't really used iTunes since years ago -- I'm sure there's even been times where I have downloaded several new ITunes updates, without opening iTunes in between :)

Anyway, it's always bugged me that the playlist "My Favorites" or whatever it's called has some limit to the number of songs -- so once my number of 5-star songs got so big, no 4-star songs started appearing on the list. This is not what I wanted.

So it seems that now there's more ways to control these kinds of playlists? I'll have to check that out.

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How do you set it up to play those songs more frequently?

I have a very 'tricky' (read: complex) way to make my song collection. But it's based on a simple trick in iTunes:

Create a new, smart playlist. At the bottom, when it gives a choice whether to include all songs, select 'play 200 least-recent songs'. Use that playlist as the source for the 'shuffle' playlist, making sure to have 'play higher-rated songs more often' selected.

That will help clear out a backlog of never-played and rarely-played songs.

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16 November 2006 (there are a few sound effects that are further back, but this is the furthest back SONG.) It was a Mannheim Steamroller Christmas song that didn't get caught this past holiday cycle.

I've only got 1336 items. Haven't been very rigorous at ripping CDs.

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It's not including iPod plays, which is where I listen to music most often.

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That's a tricky question, because I don't have a playlist including all of my songs -- the largest my playlists have gotten is *looking* 46 songs. Things get rotated in and out, but I prefer local and frequent repetition at any given time.

My version of Winamp doesn't keep statistics like that, but with 46 songs playing for 8+ hours while I am at work, I would guess every song cycles in at least once a day. Its PRNG is pretty horrible, but not that bad.

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