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I'm wondering if there are advanced ways to track play count in iTunes. I want to be able to see who my top played artists and composers are, not just songs. Is there a way to, say, at the end of the month, see which artists and composers have been played the most, and specifically, for how many hours. I'm on a PC, by the way.

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Perhaps some sort of smart playlist, but I can't think of anything at the moment. – Chris A Mar 1 at 4:48

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Doug Adams has an app called MySpins which provides that kind of information.

Oh, sorry, you're on a PC; it's a Mac app. Anyway, I'll leave the answer for any Mac users who are looking for such a solution.

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I wish I had a direct answer using iTunes, which I don't. If you don't mind your play information going to an online service I highly recommend Last.fm and their iTunes plugin. Their service lets you easily view top-played songs and artists over different time periods.

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I'm looking into Last FM, but I'm wondering if the scrobbler will keep track of what I play on my iPod Classic after I sync it. Does anyone know? – andrewbarnard Mar 1 at 23:48
If you set your iPod to sync play counts to iTunes then it should. I haven't used iScrobber in about a year but it did then. It detected an iPod had synced and then analyzed play count differences. It even read last play time and posted the plays at the exact times you played them. – bispymusic Mar 2 at 2:36
Could I get it to show me a chart showing the top played artists and composers for a certain month? And does it go by hours played, not just number of tracks played? – andrewbarnard Mar 2 at 3:22
I don't believe it will track composers, unless you're speaking of classical music. It uses the Artist field in iTunes tags. And I believe it's simply tracks played, not taking into account song length. Last.fm makes APIs available to developers though so it's possible some Google searching could reveal some of these more specific features. – bispymusic Mar 2 at 3:29

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