Re: Smart Playlists and Song Rating

On Sun, Jul 20, 2003 at 03:23:06PM -0500, Ben Johnson wrote:
> I saw over at the gtkPod (linux ipod) site that they've figured out the 
> song count and song rating stuff in the iTunesDB

Ah, awesome that they've figured it out.

> Structure of play count files:
> 
> Offset     Meaning
> 0x00-03    "mhdp": header identifier
> 0x04-07    0x60: length of header
> 0x08-0b    0x10 or 0x0c: size of one entry in bytes
>          (one entry is one song, 0x10 is for 2.0 firmware, 0x0c is
>          for 1.3 firmware)
> 0x0c-0f    number of entries (songs on iPod)
> 0x10-5f    0x00: dummy space
> 
> Structure of each entry
> 
> Entries start at 0x60 (or whatever is written in offxet 0x04 above)
> and are of length 0x10 (2.0 firmware) or 0x0c (1.3 firmware)
> 
> Offset     Meaning
> 0x00-0x03  number of times song has been played
> 0x04-0x07  mac-timestamp (number of seconds since GMT 0:00 1-Jan-1904)
>             subtract 2,082,844,800 seconds to obtain Unix timestamp
>          (number of seconds since GMT 0:00 1-Jan-1970)
> 0x08-0x0b  0x00 ???
> 0x0c-0x0f  star rating * 0x14 (only available with 2.0 firmware)

Im missing one: the RMS volume of the track. Perhaps thats the "???" in
your quote? It would make sense, the ipod supposedly keeps track of
overall volume of a track so you can normalize/replaygain the tracks so
there are no more earshattering or whispersoft-then-earshattering
experiences.

> Can we hope to have access to this functionality in the next release of 
> ephpod?  Maybe not as full of an implementation as iTunes has, but at 
> least the ability to have a "recently played" playlist and to 
> sort/manually create a playlist by star rating would be great.

I don't really understand how this 'recently played' works. I can sortof
see the use when you want to look back at what you've played so you can
identify (or at least narrow down the proces of finding) a track you really
liked. But in my experience you usually just 'happen upon' a track by
the shuffle function. I think very few people DJ themselves and at the
end of the last track go thru their playlists and select the next track
they want to hear. And if its just the computer picking the tunes
anyway, then what use is this 'recently played' list?

Anyway well I know the ephpod coder is working on lots of things
including these extended features, but personally Id love to first see
AAC (MP4) fully supported since that really is a key feature, and after
that extra 'frills' like these options and the 'full legible path and
filenames' trick I've documented.
(http://ipodlounge.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3877)

Cheers!

-M

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