Listening History

See every song you've played to the end in ClassicTunes, with when you played it, and play, search, sort and tidy the list.

History, in the sidebar's library section, lists every song you've played to the end in ClassicTunes on your Mac, newest first, with the date and time you played it. Play a song twice and it's listed twice.

#What counts as a play

A song counts when it plays to the end (or to its stop time, if it has one in Get Info › Options). Videos and audiobook files count the same way. Each play:

• appears in History,
• adds one to the song's play count and sets when it was last played,
• reaches the iPod at the next sync.

Plays on an iPod or in Rockbox add to the songs' play counts at the next sync, but aren't listed in History. Podcast episodes and CD tracks you play without importing aren't listed either.

#The list

Click a column heading to sort by it; click it again to reverse the order. The sort is remembered for each library. Type in the search field in the toolbar to find songs by title, artist or album.

History keeps your most recent 20,000 plays; older ones are dropped as new ones are added.

#Play and use songs from History

• Double-click a song to play it, followed by the rest of the list in the order shown.
• Select songs (⌘-click or ⇧-click for several) and right-click for the same commands as anywhere else in your library: Play, Shuffle, Play Next, Add to Up Next, Info › Get Info, Add to Playlist (including New Playlist with These Songs), Rating, Show in Finder and more. A song played several times is included once.

Making a playlist of what you've been enjoying lately is a quick way to put it on your iPod.

#Remove plays from History

• Select entries and press Delete, or right-click and choose Remove from History.
• To empty the list, click Clear History in the toolbar, then Clear History to confirm.

Removing entries only changes the list. Your songs, playlists and play counts aren't affected.

#From AppleScript and Shortcuts

The History list itself isn't scriptable, but every track's played count and played date are, including plays on iPods:

tell application "ClassicTunes"
    -- Songs played in the last week
    set recent to every track whose played date > ((current date) - 7 * days)
    repeat with t in recent
        log (name of t) & " (" & (played count of t) & " plays)"
    end repeat
end tell

See AppleScript. In Shortcuts (macOS 13 and later), a Track has a Play Count you can filter on; see Shortcuts.