How do I create a Radio Log Summary?

Question

Because of licensing requirements, I need to submit an annual summary report of the songs played by the University campus radio to the local intellectual property agencies. The logs are taken from MegaSeg software.
After importing the tab-delimited log file into Numbers, I deleted unwanted columns and rows (log entries) and left with these columns: Date, Duration, Song Title, Artist, Composer, Lyricist. In the final summary report, I need these columns: Date, Duration, Song Title, Artist, Composer, Lyricist, Number of Times Played.
Before processing, I have sorted in ascending order by the Date column followed by the Song Title colums. Somehow I need to read the second row and compare its Song Title and the previous row Song Title. If it don't match, I need to output the entire previous row entry to a new table and put a number "1" into the new table Number of Times Played column, then read the next row entry.
On the other hand, if the Song Title matched, I need to somehow inform the COUNTA function to read the next row entry and count again.
Does it make sense? The final summary report just need to list a unique Song Title for that particular day with the appropriate Number of Times Played filled in.

Answer 1

You may want to compare not just the song title but also the artist before you say it's the same song. But, going with just the title, here's an idea on how to do it if this is going to be a printed report:
Column B is your song title. Column C is a running total for each song. I assume that if a song is on the list from MegaSeg then it has played at least once. Column D finds the highest number for a given song.
EDIT: Something is not letting the less than and greater than signs show up in this post. In the formulas below, it should be if B3 is less than or greater than "", and same for B2.
C2=1
C3=IF(B3"",IF(B3=B2,C2+1,1),"") and so on for the rest of the column
D2=IF(B2"", IF(C3>C2,"",C2),"")
Then you can use the reorganize/sort feature to hide all rows that don't have a number in column D. This will work for a printed report or a PDF but probably won't completely do the trick if you need to export it as an Excel spreadsheet.
I would recommend you create another column where you compare title and artist and set it to TRUE if they are the same then adjust the IF statement in column C accordingly based on this new column.
Message was edited by: Badunit
Message was edited by: Badunit