Have you ever wanted to update the playcount of your songs in iTunes. Or have you ever wanted to change the last played date and time of an iTunes song.
Why would you want to do that ? If you are like me, you might initially have a low quality MP3 song on your iPod (e.g. 192 kbps in my case) and you have listened to it 10 times already. The playcount for this track (in iTunes) will be 10. However, perhaps you later bought the actual CD and then decided to rip it with a better quality rate (e.g. 320 kbps). And of course, you then want to replace the old copy with the new one. Because you are deleting the old file and replacing it with a new one, iTunes does not know how to transfer the current playcount (of 10) to the new track. I don’t know about you but I get very uncomfortable about that. I personally like to “transfer” the playcount to the new copy of the old song.
I had no solution to the above for years until recently when I had time to look through the magnificent iLounge forums. Someone by the name of Tiketti (from Helsinki, Finland) had in fact in 2004 (4 years ago !) wrote some scripts to do exactly this. He is so smart and wonderful !!
Here’s the link: “Update playcount/last played manually with these scripts “
I was very impressed and decided to try it out. It turned out to be pretty easy and worked extremely well !
Tonight I wanted to replace an existing song (cannot remember where I found it) with a new one that I had finally found time to rip from CD into better quality rate.
My existing song has a bit rate of 192kbps and a playcount of 2:
I then copy the author’s script into a notepad and then saved it with a file extension of “.vbs”
In iTunes, I removed the old lower quality song and then replace it with the higher quality song. However, the playcount is hence ZERO:
I then execute the script (after selecting on the track in iTunes) and a pop up box appears and I entered “2” which was the last playcount for the previous lower quality file:
Now the playcount is updated in iTunes! SUPER !!!
Pretty cool huh. EXACTLY what I needed.
There is another change you can do. The last play date/time is empty as it is a new file. However, it now has a playcount of 2 (from the previous file). If you really want, you can run another VB Script from the same author which will update the last played date/time.
Once again, I must stress this is NOT my script. This is from iLounge and full credit must be given to Mr. Tiketti from Finland.
Thank you Mr. Tiketti ! 🙂
Related posts:
