Internet iTunes Registry: an interesting oddity
I stumbled across this one via the ever-generous auspices of digg. Internet iTunes Registry (henceforward referred to as IiR) is a free, web-based service that analyses the file iTunes uses to organise your MP3s and spits out a whole slew of graphs, lists and facts that iTunes itself doesn’t provide you with access to. It’s very much a one person labour of love; if this is the sort of thing piques your interest - read on!
One caveat: using IiR requires a very brief dip into Terminal for Mac users because it requires that users upload a file in XML format. It’s a simple matter of copying and pasting a line of instructions, hitting Enter and uploading the resulting file, but it is a step that it would be much better not to have to do.
Once that’s done, you’ll see a page like the one above with some introductory stats. I apparently have a higher than average number of genres (21 against 6.7), tracks (6779 vs 1204.1), diversity (15.2603 vs 0.1366) and listening time (98.79 vs 20.02 days) which I guess proves I’m a music geek, something I knew already. There’s a whole slew of other graphs and read-outs to be found on sub-pages including Tunes Radar, Odd Facts and so on.
Quite a bit of what Internet iTunes Registry has to offer is fairly obscure, but I can think of at least one friend who’s sworn off the likes of Last.fm for fear of becoming addicted to checking its personal charts (a minor, but common malady that I’m sure many battle against), who might be interested to give this a go. Probably my favourite option is the Wallpaper Generator which creates a downloadable JPG according to a variety of criteria (resolution, source, colour, sorting, etc.) for placing on your desktop or similar. Here’s one I made earlier:
Link: Internet iTunes Registry
