While the "play count" and "last played" features of iTunes and my iPod are very useful for telling me which of my 10,000 songs I really like and obsessively listen to, they really don't help at all when I'm trying to figure out which songs I don't like. While iPod 2.0's ability to rate songs on-the-go helps track down songs that made my ears bleed, it doesn't help much with songs I just get bored of and don't particularly notice either way. And if you tell me that song ratings should do the trick, let's see you try to listen to 10,000 songs and rate them all.
So I know what songs I listen to obsessively, and I know what songs make my ears bleed, and I've rated maybe 25% of my music, but that still leaves a pretty big gap in the data I have about my listening habits. It seems like the solution for this is obvious, and this is definitely one of the top 5 features I'd like to see in iTunes 5/iPod 2.5: Skip count and last skipped.
I don't know about you, but it seems like a smart playlist of songs where last played is newer than last skipped would be a pretty good indication of what songs I actually like listening to. And as soon as I skip a song, it'd be kicked out of that playlist.
While I could write a "skip and count" applescript that would implement a tiny portion of this functionality in the same way that play counts were implemented before iTunes 3, it really needs to be in the app and on the iPod to realize its full potential.
As usual, iTunes feedback goes here and iPod feedback goes here.
two and a half years they still don’t have this. I’ve made the same suggestion. I’ve tried to jury-rig something where I play through a playlist of songs not played in the last 24 hours, and when I’m done, any songs that are left get demoted from five stars to four stars, but the approach has obvious flaws. like how to automatically re-promote them back up to five stars after a period of time.
iTunes 7 now has a last skipped option in smart playlists. Not quite sure how it works though. . .