Since 2005, I've kept logs of all the recorded music I've listened to on iTunes. I don't know know why anyone else would possibly be interested in this. But, for me, these monthly compendiums is a wonderful glimpse into the past.

Not only do I have the soundtracks for when I drove out to Burning Man, in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Or the music that helped me get through the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, or that time when I lost my passport in Peru.

But just as amazing, I can pull up what I listened to on some random, otherwise-forgotten, day, like Thursday, April 2, 2015 for instance (a lot of Beatles that day, for some reason).

It's all in there, somewhere.

Each log has the name, artist and album of the song that was played at a specific time. Some of the files, especially the older ones, can be tremendously large and therefore may take some time to open. What can I say? I love listening to music. I listen to it when I write. I listen to it while I'll work out. I listen to music when I fall asleep.

Here is the Perl program I wrote to parse the iTunes XML file that holds this info.

I keep other stats, including the top-played tracks on a weekly basis, here.