Currently Most Played stats are based on duration of album played not the actual amount of times an album is played. To me and others, this makes no sense as this is not a real representation of what really is the most played. I want to be able to see what album has had the most plays from my library , each year, over months or all time. This is all weighted by compilation albums that are made up of multiple discs or albums that just have a longer playtime. This year a I have added a lot of both plus as a lot of albums that are shorter. Most of these I know have been played more than the ones Roon decides to show me. I cant currently sort the way I want it to due to this. Surely its not hard to work this out in Roon and why was duration used to have this focus, its just not the right way at all?
Also we really need a way to set to set play counts manually as if you have to remove an album, replace it due to a new version in streaming you lose your history.
I think this is the essential part of the problem. I have only two box sets in my libary, and although I rarely play these albums, they are at top positions in my most played list. That’s only because their total playing time is so long.
But I do believe that playing time should be the main (or only) factor in a list that shows most played albums. I have an ambient album with 99 tracks (Moments, by Lull). This would always dominate my top played list if only the number of played tracks of an album is taken into account. I also have a few albums with just one, very long track (for instance: Atem, by Die Wilde Jagd). With the same criteria, these would never come into the list.
And if I remember correctly, Roon’s predecessor Sooloos looked at the tracks that were played the most times to make its top played list. I have several albums on which some tracks are played lots of times, while the rest is played seldomly. These albums, in my opinion, should not dominate the top played list only because of a single one minute track that is popular.
So, what would be the solution?
I think the number of discs in an album should be a factor here. Maybe there should be an option to exclude box sets from most played. I’m not sure. There will always be examples where such a rule would be ridiculous.
No it wouldn’t. Time played dominates everything at the moment from what I can work out and the number of tracks doesn’t affect outcome.I am not suggesting you use track count to determine the most played as that’s just wont work and will result in same wrong output. You could have a 99 track album with a playtime of 60 mins or 10 track album at 60 mins and have played them both twice, and then you have a 99 track album with a playtime of 2.5 hours and played once, the latter would be ahead with one play the other two are equal to each other regardless of track count.
We need to determine what counts as a played album before anything can change or move forward and this is what Joel’s asking as this is the tricky part of the conundrum. Should it always be it has to have had all tracks played or played to its full length , most tracks played say up to a set fraction of total track count, a fraction of the total running time? If it’s multiple discs how many discs. Lots more to consider also I imagine.
Right now just one track played seems to constitute an album as being played in Roons eyes, but the total playtime will be reasonably short and it’s this total playtime that determine the most played metric. So currently any album with a running time of 30 mins in my collection even with 6-7 full plays isn’t getting anywhere near longer albums that have been played less.
So my reason to want this carries on. One double album played 2 x in its entirety now has jumped to my 4th most played album this year because this is just total playtime. Just moving to total playtime/album running time will give a more accurate result than this. This is just played longest in current form which will always be double/triple etc albums.
So many ways to count album plays, with plenty more proposed here. It’s clear that people have different ideas of what constitutes playing an album. I personally feel like counting an album as played should reflect sitting through the album. In that case you cold take any album that at least 1 play count for every track, then use the smallest track play count as the album play count.
Of course this would ignore any album that does not have at least a single play for every single album, which might not sit right with some folks.
It’s so complicated. In an older discussion about the same thing, I remember to have opined that my impulse to start a track or an album should also count, even if I don’t listen to the very end.
To add, what about reissues with bonus tracks? Surely an album play shouldn’t be discarded if I listen to 12 original tracks but skip 4 bonus tracks.
Those are both interesting situations. It certainly seems like there is an appetite for a partial playthrough to count as an album play i.e. count an album as played even if every track hasn’t been. And thinking it all the way through I’d agree with that. I have rips of the King Crimson 40th Anniversary DVDs that had multiple remasters of the same album on the same release. I usually listen to those for the then most current remix/remaster, and I would consider those rips as played.
Unfortunately i think once you move past some strict line in the sand you start to lose any meaning in counting album plays. My number one played album is an Alfred Brendel collection that is ~130 hours long, I’ve listened to maybe a quarter of it altogether. I have other albums I’ve listened to many times. Something doesn’t sit right with me that the Brendel is my “most played” album, which I guess is the whole point of the thread. In my head an album that has track) that i have listened to many times does not mean I have played the album multiple times. That’s what the track play count is for.
I like this example, because I would never think to count those as plays, but I can understand why you would want to. Maybe it’s as simple as counting an album play for any time you press one of these buttons (with the exception of Start radio), and some part of the album actually plays
Yeah, it’s just complicated and my point is more or less only that for every “surely it HAS to be this way” it’s rather easy to find contradicting examples. And once you weight things, there will always a be case where it isn’t perfect. I also have one example of a reissue album with lots of tracks that I played once, didn’t actually listen to the CDs 2-x, and it sits too high in the sort. But on average, my sort view is quite reasonable.
One solution would be making the play count editable with a simple entry box, so that you could move albums up without actually having to play them (which would help in other cases as well, such as vinyl plays) and down without having to trawl the history. And the play history is dearly missing a filter box.
Currently that’s how it works for an album to be represented as played one track needs to be played through. I have a focus of unplayed albums all the time as still got lots I have ripped but not go to yet. They disappear from the focus after one track played.
My day job is in data management, dealing with an enterprise database and managing the data within. I run into problems like this quite often, and my professional brain is screaming possible solutions, but experience tells me that you are correct, there is no solution here that will appease everyone.
I think I like the idea of using the various play options the pop up when you interact with an album (like the image i posted above) as the play count, as those show an intentionality to play an album, as opposed to some tracks from an album. Of course that would fail for any folks who select all the tracks form an album and add them to their queue that way
I don’t keep track of unplayed albums as I would still have 1000s to this day, but that would annoy me. Playing one track does not equal playing an album for me.
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