Statistics - Definitions

This site's Aggregate Statistics page shows the current state of play with my music collection -but the significance or precise meaning of each number might not be obvious. Here are some explanations.

A “recording” is, usually, a complete work or composition, stripped from the context of any physical medium it might have been supplied on. If a CD contains eight tracks, four belonging to Symphony No. 5 and four to Symphony No. 8, then Symphony No. 5 is one “recording” and Symphony No. 8 is another, entirely separate, recording. It can work the other way round, too: if Wagner's Götterdämmerung is shipped on 4 separate CDs, it's nevertheless a single “recording”. In one sense, then, a “recording” is analogous to “what a composer wrote as a distinct unit of output”.

There are some exceptions to this general rule: if a CD ships 13 short songs by a composer, none of which have particular significance on their own, but all together they make a nice 'program' of work, then those might well be grouped together in my collection. Think 'folksongs by Benjamin Britten' or any number of works by Percy Grainger: if they last mere minutes, they have no especial, individual merit, but there's a meaningful “recording” to be had out of them in the aggregate.

You can calculate averages in many ways, but this site does it slightly more unusually than most! The number is basically a “mean” of the number of plays per day, but days on which absolutely nothing is played are not used as part of the calculation of the denominator. In other words, if I play 10 recordings on Monday, 10 on Tuesday and 10 on Friday, then when I calculate the mean number of plays on Saturday, I take 10+10+10 and divide by the three days on which some music was played: that's 10+10+10 ÷ 3 days = average of 10 per day. I do not say “30 plays over 5 days = 6 plays per day”. I'm interested in how many times I play music when I play music, not in the times when I don't, basically!

Since the release of Giocoso Version 3.30, the average number of recordings played per day is calculated on a rolling 365-day basis. That is, only plays that have taken place in the time period “now minus 365 days” are included in the calculation. This is simply because how often I played back in 2021 seems rather less than important to me now than it did in 2022!

Every recording has an accurate duration measured in seconds. If a recording is comprised of multiple tracks, the accurate duration of each track is summed to yield a single 'per recording' duration for the entire work. It's then trivially easy to sum these durations across the entire collection and derive the number of seconds the entire music collection lasts for -and then to divide that by 86,400 (the number of seconds in a day) to arrive, finally, at the number of days it would take to play the entire music collection, beginning to end, without any breaks.

Now, a physical CD can contain anywhere from barely 40 minutes to somewhere around 85 minutes of music: it's highly variable, and you can't really say that X minutes of playback time equals Y number of CDs in any meaningful manner. Nevertheless, I visited this Gramophone review and took the CD durations of the first 25 CDs listed on it, arriving at an average time for the 25 CDs of 68 minutes (technically, 67.66666…, but who's counting?!). 68 minutes is 4,080 seconds, and that's 0.0472 of a day. So, if you take my collection's total duration in days and divide by 0.0472, you arrive at a number which is, approximately, the number of physical CDs my digital music collection would represent.

It should be said, however, that 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. That portion of it which is physical is sitting in several large boxes in my loft, unloved and uncounted!

Giocoso stores its recordings with a unique folder name in its RECORDINGS table; it records its plays with a unique folder name in its PLAYS table. If you simply say 'select me items in the RECORDINGS table which have no corresponding folder name in the PLAYS table', that will be a list of recordings without matching plays: those are counted as unplayed recordings. If you then take that number of unplayed recordings and divide by the total number of items in the RECORDINGS table, that gives you the proportion of the collection which doesn't have a matching play and is thus unplayed.

Of course, I may have listened to a recording using a player that isn't Giocoso (that would be true for anything I played before 9th January 2021, of course, which is when Giocoso was first written), so Giocoso saying “10% of your collection is unplayed” doesn't mean 10% is really unplayed: it means that Giocoso isn't aware of 10% of the collection having been played. At the time of writing (October 2024), for example, I know that Giocoso doesn't think I've played any part of the Solti Ring Cycle… but I most certainly have, completely, multiple times… just not in the past 4 years!

The count of plays can obviously exceed the number of recordings if you play something more than once!

You can do that and still leave other recordings in your collection completely unplayed, however, so it's perfectly possible to have Plays exceed Recordings and yet still have a non-zero percentage of unplayed recordings. If I own 10 recordings 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 plays.

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