A listening history page with better integration and more information than last.fm

I think that everyone has some curiosity about what they listen to. We get a little satisfaction from looking at the play counts of our songs, and I'm sure that many people have, like me, made a smart playlist to see what their top 25 or so most played tracks are. Last.fm takes listening history a step further by analyzing your play counts and giving you more information about them than a smart playlist can, such as what artists you listen to most, or what you listened to most over a particular period of time.

Last.fm is great, but I think it would also be really beneficial to have a better way to view listening history within Songbird. There are some downsides to last.fm: it has a busy web interface, ads, and isn't as flexible as it could be. For example, you can see what songs and artists you listen to most, but it is not easy to see what your top played albums or tags are. You can see playback history for specific weeks, but not for specific days, months, or years. It keeps track of play counts, but not how much time you've spent listening, which would be more useful for artists in your library who tend to have really long songs. It also has no way of distinguishing where your play counts came from, such as from the library, a portable device, or a web stream.

I think there should be a "Listening History" option in the main sidebar of Songbird so you can discover more information about your listening patterns, and in a way that feels more integrated with Songbird than last.fm.



I went through a number of different mockups trying to make a simple but informative interface for a listening history page, and this was the best I could come up with. The page could default to the listening history of the current month or day, but you could quickly set a different period of time in the top left. You can see the basic stats of that period of time under the header, and then a bar graph distribution to easily visualize how you listened to music over that period of time. In this mockup, there is a daily distribution graph because it is over the course of a month.

To get some specifics about a smaller part of that time period, you could mouse over any of the bars and, as seen in the mockup, it could give you a summary of that piece of time in a tool tip. If you were still curious about it, you could click the bar to zoom into that smaller period time and get a closer look. For example, you could be looking at your history for the month of April, 2009, and want to take a closer look at what you listened to on April 21, 2009, so you could click on that day in the bar graph quickly instead of having to set it in the calender in the top left. The forward and back buttons in Songbird could help you navigate back to a time period you were looking at before.

Under this graph, there could be simple charts that show the top played items of different groups.



You could see top artists, top albums, and top songs. I also think it would be extremely useful to show the user's top played tags if a multiple tagging system is eventually implemented, but genre would also suffice. It could just give you an idea of the sort of moods you were in by seeing what kind of tags you played most during a period of time.

There have been a few topics about listening history in Songbird:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

For this to be possible, Songbird might have to store some additional information with play counts, such as when each one occurred, and possibly where it came from, such as a portable media device, the library, or a stream. However, I didn't add any way in the mockups to view this distinction. Hopefully these mockups and ideas can help someone out if they eventually attempt to code a history page for Songbird. This is also the last item on the list of ideas I had to make mockups and topics about. Hopefully my creative Songbird juices have not run out for good :P.