ios get play count for items in the media library

Question

I am currently trying to categorise a users music collection and the ability to get the users most played songs/artists would greatly improve the user experience in the app. Is it possible to get the play count? and how would I go about doing it

Answer 1

MPMediaItem has the method:

- (id) valueForProperty: (NSString *) property

This method return the media property key that you want the corresponding value of. And one of the possibles values is MPMediaItemPropertyPlayCount:

The number of times the user has played the media item. Value is an NSNumber object representing an NSUInteger data type.

You can check the doc here and here.

Answer 2

Should you want to find the user's most played track(s), you could:

1. Store all media items (i.e. [[MPMediaQuery songsQuery] items]) and their properties in a database (i.e. Core Data), fetch them with an NSFetchRequest and sort the results with NSSortDescriptor.

2. ...or use [[MPMediaQuery songsQuery] items] and sort the results on the MPMediaItemPropertyPlayCount property.

Option (1) is probably best, especially if you're looking to categorize the music collection (I guess (2) could be worse performance-wise too).

There's also a similar answer on SO to help answer your question.

Check out the Apple docs for more info on MPMediaQueries.