How can I import play counts ? (itunes, lastfm, files, API, whatever)

I have to admit that the more I use Roon, the more I love it.
But I have years of playcount history in Lastfm, with a good part synced to itunes with some scripts and stuff and I would love to see this “past” of my listening history reflected in Roon.
It seems that Roon is not importing the play count data from the iTunes XML.
Is there another way ?

I know there is a feature request for this, but it’s a year old and not really popular:

Any suggestion ?

Using the files ID3 tag ?
Getting the information directly from my Lastfm playcount ? (my dream)
Using the soon to get released Roon API ?
Interacting directly with Roon database ?

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I don’t believe it’s possible right now.

As of now, there is no way to import play count. As such, this should be a Feature Request, and you should add your voice to that Feature Request thread.

I did, but it seems that only the suggestion creator and me want this, so I was wondering if I could do something on my own.
And if other people found an alternative way.
I don’t understand why the playcount is not included in the itunes xml import btw. Any idea ?

I can’t speak for the devs, sorry. What constitutes a play count has changed in Roon over the past couple of years. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but Roon tracks the percentage of the song actually played, you can see it in History. So, it might be that “play count” is not a number in a field but a calculation based on data points in a history table.

I sense it’s the simple fact that they have to draw the line somewhere to enable them to release all the features they do at the speed they do it and with such a small team.

I doubt it’s uber tricky, but everything takes some time. A few of us have requested and I’m sure it will come some day, at which point my library will shuffle around completely since only newer stuff is easily found by ‘most played’ sort, which is actually what I use the most.

Messing with the database would probably be a hardcore way of doing it but may be possible I suppose. I doubt the api will have the functionality at the outset.

Thanks for your answers. OK I guess the best way is: patience.

I’ll vote for this one, too. The way those iTunes play counts have built up over time means something.

Another vote to include importing of external data for play counts.

I recall that iTunes uses something like “greater than 4 seconds and less than 17 seconds” to evaluate if a song is “Skipped”. For a play count the duration has to equal the seconds of the track, then iTunes increments the play count. I don’t like this set of rules, whatever the evaluation criteria is. The reason why is that a song is not played, in state of played (a percentage of the duration), or duration is equal to time played.

With that going in position a user would accept that data would not have the granularity that Roon has. Roon has a percentage played (someone else mentioned it too). However, it may be good enough for most to have some (most) of the historical data.

If Roon scrobbles to Last.fm, what would you gain by having your previous history in Roon? Do you think Roon would be enhanced with more play data? I hope the (official) answers are in line with providing a richer experience from historical data.

Disregard if this has been resolved, I didn’t find an answer on a cursory search.

Is there any official feature request I can add my vote to for this? Any way of importing play counts would be fine (XML, TAGs, Lastfm history…) any way I could get my +400K play counts into Roon would be great.

Any updates on this? Just a simple manual import would be fine.

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