September 19th, 2006

Filed under:
Music, Technology
29 Comments »

Does Skip Count Work in iTunes for the PC?

Tonight I discovered a small, undocumented feature in iTunes 7.0: skip count. You can add this column to your iTunes library (on the PC, click Options on the View menu), and see how many times you’ve skipped a particular song. I sometimes amuse myself by constructing smart playlists based on obscure criteria, and here’s another variable for my arsenal.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve definitely skipped a bunch of songs since installing the new version of iTunes, yet the Skip Count column is totally empty. If I skip a song, it should display (at least) ‘1′ in the Skip Count column. However, no matter how many times I skip Mister Mister’s ‘Take These Broken Wings’, I get no joy. This is despite the fact that Skip Count’s more positive cousin Play Count works perfectly.

iTunes users in the PC ghetto: is this little feature working for you? Is my library or iTunes installation jacked?

Comments: 29 Responses so far

Todd Sieling
September 19th, 2006
9:57 pm

It doesn’t work on my Macbook, either, so it looks like a feature that wasn’t ready to be displayed? Anyway it will be a fun bit of info-porn when it’s fixed and working. Good find.

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Jon
September 19th, 2006
11:53 pm

SkipCount works on my iMac, and has already been pressed into service on a few auto-playlist, but it seems to only register skips on iTunes, and not those from your iPod.

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Kate Trgovac
September 20th, 2006
6:43 am

SkipCount and LastSkipped work on my PC. I have not synced my iPod since installing 7, so not sure if it records those or not on the PC.

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Steven
September 20th, 2006
12:22 pm

It works fabulously for me on my PC, and it also has successfully detected the skipped tracks that I have skipped on my iPod. I suspect you need a 5G or higher iPod with the latest firmware to take advantage of this feature, though.

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Brian
September 20th, 2006
1:10 pm

Hope you were kidding about having Mister Mister in iTunes, however much fun it is to skip.

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ALVARO
October 4th, 2006
10:19 am

I have tested on mine and it works. On the ipod you have to press next during playbakc between 2 and 20 seconds…after or before it work count it…

On Itunes, you need to press the right arrow…..I have not tested the time (2 -20) if it is also the same on Itunes…

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anonymous Reply:
April 8th, 2009 at 4:10 pm

ah that makes sense cuz I know I’ve skipped a buncha songs and most of the time I didn’t think it was registering
now that I look at what you’re saying I got it

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Smartguy
October 8th, 2006
6:27 am

The secret is really hard to decipher, but I can assure you this is why it doesn’t seem to work for many people:

It doesn’t work on Smart Playlists. The skip count only increments when playing from the Library or from regular Playlists.

No idea why this is, but it seems consistent.

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frack
October 11th, 2006
4:05 pm

So the trick seems to be the 2-20 second range, skip the track outside the range and it won’t count it. Works on my iPod (5th Gen) and in iTunes 7.0.1.8. It does seem to work in smart playlists as well.

Thanks for the time-range tip, I was getting really annoyed that it wasn’t working!

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Matt
October 23rd, 2006
7:23 pm

Will this work in a 4G Ipod. I have a 30 G Photo and really want this to work. I can’t get it to do so, however. I’m on a PC. Any other thoughts?

Matt

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Daniel
October 29th, 2006
10:10 am

I too recently started making playlists using the Skip data, and am seeing problems with it. One thing is that it doesn’t count skips on the iPod, which is reasonable. The real problem I’m seeing is that skip doesn’t work all the time, it only works some of the time. For example, I have a playlist which has songs that were not skipped in the last 2 days. Just now I skipped “Marianne Faithful - Kissin’ Time” and it disappeared from the list. However, after listening to the following song, I then skipped “Bohren und der Club der Gore - Vigilante Crusade”, but that skip was not counted at all. I tried it three more times with no luck. This was all within the smart playlist too, so Smartguy is incorrect that it never works in smart playlists. Very strange… I’m wondering what the logic is for counting skips.

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Madam
December 29th, 2006
2:44 am

For me the logic in counting skips goes like this. I have playlist of my most frequently played tracks, however as I get tired of them I tend to skip them. So with the ability to count skips I can set my frequently played playlist eventually drop a song I have skipped say more than twice. Still experimenting with feature. Not sure if it works or not. iTunes 7.0.2 on Windows XP SP2.

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Bobo
January 1st, 2007
7:35 am

I recently loose my itunes library in a computer crash. When I upload it again, after a couple of tunes were played, I display that feature. Inexplicably, i’ve got one track who was skipped 124 times (!!!!) in 1 hour. I’ve got 9 tracks with impossibly high numbers (racing from 124 to 34) and the others were 0….

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wesman
January 24th, 2007
11:02 am

this works _sometimes_ on my PC - I’m using v7.0.2.16 on a windows 2000 machine and I just made a smart playlist where skipcount > 0 and about 20 songs showed up - I clicked play on one, then skipped it and the skip count went up from 1 to 2. I played the song again, click skip and the play count did not increase - I experimented with a few files and found that it only increments this counter sometimes but not 100% consistently.

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pinkle
February 15th, 2007
2:34 pm

I just found this article while Googling for a solution.
Something is definitely up with this feature, it says I’ve skipped one of my favourite songs 1792 times, which is much higher than it’s play count. It lists about 50 random tracks as being skipped 1024 times, a couple of others in the thousands and then the rest 0.

:s

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Nile
April 5th, 2007
5:47 am

I think the logic works as follows :
Skip Counter is incremented only if you skip the song before the 20 second mark. If you skip the song after listening to 20 seconds of it, it doesn’t count as a skip …

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Garth
April 27th, 2007
9:52 am

I’ve had similar trouble seeing consistent behavior with the skip count. I have a 2nd generation 8gb Nano (sw v1.1.2). (iTunes sw v7.0.2.16) I just tried testing the 2-20 second idea by skipping one tune at the following points in time (in seconds): 1, 2.1, 3, 4, 19, 20.1 and 21. I had 3 skips registered before the test, resynced, and still have only 3 skips. I was selecting the song on the Nano for playback via Music/Artists/Name/etc.

My suspicion is that SmartGuy’s insightful comment on Smart Playlists is right on target because most of my songs (including the one I tested) are on my iPod via smart playlists. This raised one question for me: Will the skip count with songs synced to the device via a smart playlist fail all the time or only when the song is played by selecting the smart playlist in question? Unfortunately, my little test tells me that it’ll fail with such songs (synced via smart playlist) all the time.

Next, I created a standard playlist with just this same song in it, synced it to the iPod and tested a few spots again in and around the 2 to 20 second range. Again, the skip count as indicated in iTunes didn’t budge. This was with the song on the ipod thanks to both the smart and that standard playlists.

So I removed the song from the smartplaylist, leaving it on the ipod only via the standard playlist. I test some skips again, synced again and, no change. I tried closing iTunes and reopening; no change.

I have the distinctive feeling I’m wasting my time.

If I’m having this much trouble creating skips, I wonder where I got all my skip counts. Any way to get it working predictably?

Thanks,
Garth

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Me
May 6th, 2007
3:36 am

Has anyone else got weird numbers for the play count? I keep gettin numbers like 1024,768,512,256,128,64,32,16,8,4,2,1 and nothing else? Weird or what?

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Kris
July 15th, 2007
1:59 pm

Just as ‘Me’ says, I have the weird numbers too, which are powers of 2. Today I have 3 with 1024, 1 with 512, 3 with 256, 1 each with 128, 64, 16 and 8. I have several 1, 2 and 3 counts, but they can’t be trusted either since 1 and 2 are powers of 2 and 3 is only one ‘real skip’ after a fake 2.

A worthless feature.

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Skip
September 4th, 2007
1:30 pm

Playing with my library it seems that only songs with ID3 v2.4 tags correctly record skip count (This was in party shuffle mode running from a smart playlist)

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Skip
September 4th, 2007
1:40 pm

Actually I selected all the songs in my library, right clicked to “Reset Skip Count” and now it seems to work correctly for all songs.

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Victor Ly
December 8th, 2007
6:34 pm

I found this site using Google.com because I suspected a problem with my Skip Count as well. I have skipped a lot of tracks dozens of times each, yet, when I sort my library by Skip Count, the song with the highest skip count is only 3.

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Ahmed Moharram
February 6th, 2008
4:27 am

Ok guys i know how to get it work,
first i thought i didnt work but it was a feature not a bug.
You must play the song for at least 3 seconds then when skip, it will increase the skip count!

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Mike
April 30th, 2008
3:03 pm

So i wanted to make a smart playlist called “Never Played”….and i set the parameters to “Play count less than 1″ and “Skip count less than 1″ and set it to 40 random songs, with live updating…..but i noticed it wasnt counting my skips because of that “first 20 seconds” rule….well a lot of the time i decide that i dont want to hear the song that comes up, but its in the middle of the song when i decide to skip it….it wont get removed from the list because it isnt counted as a play unless it finishes, and its not a skip cuz i waited too long…..so until there is a fix for this, im just going to have to restart the song and then skip it to make it disappear from the playlist

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October 13th, 2008
8:25 pm

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October 13th, 2008
8:27 pm

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David
December 9th, 2008
5:27 pm

“So the trick seems to be the 2-20 second range, skip the track outside the range and it won’t count it. Works on my iPod (5th Gen) and in iTunes 7.0.1.8. It does seem to work in smart playlists as well.”

I can verify that I’m able to reproduce these findings.

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Stuart Anderson
January 3rd, 2009
4:40 pm

I’ve been having the same problems and since first reading your post last night I’ve written a ‘toy’ to fix the problem. Its written in Java and watches for start and end events in iTunes and works out if the track finished playing on its own or was skipped.

I’ve popped it up here http://www.nxfifteen.com/2009/01/justskip.html so if anyone’s interested in a work round, if not solution this might help you out.

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BernySerdito
October 2nd, 2009
6:27 am

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