Damage control
==============

Friday 29 January 2010 13:21

Since I have a decent UPNP client again most of the
stuff I listen to is scrobbled to last.fm. So
last.fm provides some data about that. But without
an explanation those are just meaningless
statistics. So here is the explanation.

My music library is an old fashioned collection of
ripped audio CDs. On the filesystem they are
organized in artist and album directories, but they
are played through the MediaTomb UPNP server, with
a custom import script that lists all tracks in an
artist and album hierarchy, because there are of
course also albums with tracks by different
artists. That whole bunch is then usually played in
a random order. The issue that skews the statistics
is that last.fm only counts the number of times a
track is played, which doesn't represent the amount
of listening. That's because not every track has
the same length, and it varies hugely in my music
library. Playing a single track by Ben Liebrand
takes usually an hour, and some tracks are glued
together from three CDs and go on for three hours.
From other artists I only have some single
collection with a lot of classic three minute
tracks which can rack up about twenty plays per
hour. Jan Hammer has a lot of short tracks, with
the Miami Vice theme being only one minute, and
appearing three times in my collection because it's
on 3 different CDs. And in between that are a lot
of remixes that are longer than the average radio
edit, so the weighted average is a bit different
than what last.fm shows.

And I cheat by also also scrobbling the tracks I
hear when listening to Radio Stad Den Haag.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/play/2010/01/29/damage-control/