Since the day they were introduced I absolutely failed to get my head around how me deciding to stop playback by pressing Stop could ever be considered a skip?
The skip count figure, to me, is completely meaningless.
They've been around for a long time now, so, out of curiosity, is anyone using this data for anything useful?
I actually use it a bit, and I understand why Stop is considered a skip (both technically and philosophically). MC doesn't distinguish between a stopping and advancing to the next track (or skipping to the previous track). When you advance to the next track, as far as the engine is concerned, this is three "discreet" actions: stop playback of the current file, advance Playing Now to the next file, and start playback of this file.
But, I also get why it might consider a stop a skip. Because, in my house, quite often if "something bad" comes on, my reaction
is to hit Stop (especially if one or two other tracks in the list have been bad as well). Sometimes, yes, I'll hit next to skip past it, but I'd say almost as often, I hit stop, especially if the file is particularly bad. I do this (as a gut instinct sometimes, but) so I can browse around and pick something new, without the obnoxious sound of the "terrible" in my ears (and sometimes so I can delete the offender).
So, if you tracked only those times when I skip to the next track soon after starting playback of a file, you'd miss a bunch of these instances.
It does not care how playback was stopped. It only cares where the "bookmark" in the file was (where the Playhead was) when you stopped it. This is, for me, a fairly accurate representation of how likely I am to dislike a file. There are exceptions, and you can't just blindly trust the statistic, but I think this would apply to other methods of collecting the statistic equally. You'll get "extras" no matter what. This way, at least you don't ever miss anything.
I have a Smartlist that filter out songs I've rated highly, those with a similarly high [Number Plays] count (if it is played a lot, it'll also be skipped a lot, so I do some math trickery comparing the two stats), and a few other things I use to "protect" files, and then it sort files with large [Skip Count] to the top.
Every so often, I go though this list, and I usually find I want to delete or Rate 1 Star a bunch of the files in the first 20-40 entries in the list.
