Play Statistics from Giocoso
This data is updated every 15 minutes (at 0, 15, 30 and 45 minutes past the hour)
| Statistic | Value | Comments |
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| Statistic | Value | Comments |
Integrity Statistics from Niente:
This data is updated once a day at 6AM
| Statname | Statval |
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| Statname | Statval |
Notes:
- A 'recording' is, usually, a complete 'work' or composition (the exceptions are where multiple, very short compositions by a composer are 'grouped' into a single recording). Thus, all four movements of Beethoven's 5th Symphony count as a single 'recording'; the entire 4+ hours of Wagner's Götterdämmerung likewise counts as another, separate and single recording ...and so on. Neither the number of CDs the music came on, nor the number of tracks it might be comprised of, are ever counted separately from the work of which they are a part, in other words.
- The average number of recordings played per day is the count of the plays to date, divided by the number of days on which at least something was played, starting from January 9th 2021. A day on which no music at all is played is not included in the divisor to obtain the average per-day play count. Thus, if I played 10 recordings each on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, then zero recordings on Thursday and Friday, the average plays-per-day figure calculated on Saturday would be 10 (that is, 10+10+10, divided by the three days on which any music at all was played), not 6 (which is what 10+10+10+0+0 ÷ 5 would get you).
- The 'total number of recordings' statistic is a count of unique 'extended composition names' (See Axiom 5). Thus, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 will be counted multiple times, because Bernstein, Klemperer, Rattle, Gardiner, Markevitch and the world and his dog all made recordings of that symphony, and examples of each exist in the collection. The conductor (or other 'distinguishing performer') makes each instance of the same composition get counted as a separate 'recording'.
- Each recording has an accurate duration measured in seconds. If a particular recording is comprised of multiple tracks, the duration of each track is summed to yield a single 'per recording' duration (again, in seconds) for the whole work. All the per-recording durations are then summed together and are finally divided by 86,400 to convert the total seconds duration into a total duration expressed as a number of days.
- A physical CD can contain anywhere from barely 40 minutes of music to somewhere around 85 minutes of music. For the purposes of calculating a 'standard CD equivalent', I took the CD durations of the first 25 CDs listed on this Gramophone review and computed an average of 68 minutes (technically, 67.66666..., but who's counting?!). So, if you take my collection's total duration and divide by that 'idealised' 68 minutes, you get an approximate count of how many physical CDs would be needed to store all of my music. I have no idea how many physical CDs I actually have, especially since I switched to buying FLAC downloads from the likes of Prestoclassical in around 2015: large parts of my collection have therefore never existed in physical form.
- The count of 'plays' is taken from Giocoso's plays table; the count of 'recordings' is taken from Giocoso's recordings table; the count of unplayed recordings is obtained by selecting those records from recordings that do not have a corresponding row in the plays table. Divide the unplayed count by the total number of recordings to calculate the percentage of recordings not yet played (in either Giocoso or its predecessor application, AMP). Note that this means I've actually played practically all of my music collection at some point or other over the past couple of decades -but the 'percentage unplayed' figure specifically refers to the amount of music I haven't played in those two specific pieces of music player software only, and only since January 9th 2021.
- The count of "recordings" from Giocoso can differ from that counted by Niente, because Giocoso plays folders and Niente checks the physical and logical integrity of individual FLAC files. If you always use Semplice's ability to create 'SuperFLACs', turning multiple "track FLACs" in a folder into a single large FLAC representing the entire composition in one file, then the counts from the two programs will return the same recording count, since there will be one file per folder and the counts of files and folders will therefore be identical: that should always be the case for my own statistics shown above! If, on the other hand, you prefer to leave each movement of a symphony as a separate 'per track' FLAC file, then Giocoso will count one thing (the folder containing the four tracks), whilst Niente will count four things (the four per-track FLACs themselves). Another source of 'legitimate' discrepancy between the recording counts of the two programs is that Niente and Giocoso are refreshed at different intervals and in different ways. Giocoso only does 'fast scans' nightly, and 'full scans' only take place fortnightly. Niente, however, does the equivalent of a Giocoso full scan every night. If I've re-named a recording, therefore, Niente will know about this almost immediately, but Giocoso won't remove the item under its old name for up to a fortnight: it will be counting two recordings where Niente knows there's only one. Regardless of why a count discrepancy arises between Giocoso and Niente, therefore, the discrepancy is rather less important than that the other Niente statistics should indicate no internal physical or logical corruption with the recordings it has analysed!
- 'Potential Volume Boosts' is unlikely to ever be zero: recordings can be released at what would be deemed to be 'low levels' for all sorts of reasons that it would be foolish to 'correct'. For example, recordings made in the Kingsway Hall often had the rumble of a tube train in the background: boost that recording's volume and you end up with a tube train very obviously in your listening room! Another example I have is of an organ recital in Norwich Cathedral: boost it by the maximum possible boost and all you can really hear is incredibly-distracting ambient noise that the recording engineer had sought to suppress by recording things at a lower level whilst letting an organ's natural dominance take over. So, there are good reasons for not boosting a recording's volume levels, and the 'potential boosts' statistic is therefore not an error as such, merely a piece of non-zero information.
- Number of recordings played can exceed the number of recordings in the collection and yet still leave a percentage of unplayed recordings, for the simple reason that a recording can be played more than once. If you have 10 recordings in your collection and play 1 of them 100 times, your count of plays will be 100, your count of unplayed will be 9 and your percentage unplayed will be 90%, despite the high absolute number of played recordings.