IOS 6.1: Playcounts / Last played still DOA

Just checked and Playcounts and Last Played info is not synching to the cloud and to iTunes.
Star-ratings seems to still sync like before
Total Bummer

The update to the cloud appears to be triggered by completely playing a song through after a 24 hour period has ended."
I can confirm that this is the case -- i played over 30 songs in the last 24 hours since i restablished the songs in the cloud (via iTunes) and reloaded the iTunes Match listing on my iPhone. Approximately 24 hours later, the songs I played appeared in iTunes as played with updated play counts and date played time.
I played The Beatles "While my Guitar Gently Weeps" twice, and it updated the play counts +2
One other thing i noticed is that the first song I played after the 24 hour period updated almost instantly in iTunes -- this happened yesterday as well. The first song of a new 24 hour period will show up first -- then there seems to be a hold for 24 hours until the period ends and all tracks are written - its as if the first song of the 24 hour period is the marker it basis the period on....
UPDATE:
Day 2: Play Count and Date Last Played is syncing
Looks like the start of my 24-hour cycle is around 5:42pm EST. Functionality was the same as yesterday -- the first track of the period marks the start time and then nothing for 24 hours -- once the period is over all tracks played from that period show up as played with new time stamps and +1 playcounts.
Once you play a new set of songs in the new 24-hour period, the first track will appear in your recently played - the rest of the tracks you play in that time period will not show up for 24 hours.
The Smart Playlists on the phone are still nothing like what is in iTunes, which is annoying, but at least were making progress...

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Bug in newest version of iTunes: last played data not updating after songs are played

I just downloaded the newest version of iTunes on my Mac. The "last played" data is not updating automatically after a song has finished playing (even after waiting for a while). Sometimes in the older versions it would take 5-10 second for the data to update automatically, but even after several minutes, "last played" still shows as if the song had not just been played.

RestonMacGuy wrote:
I did something similar, but not the same: I "played" a few tracks from the iPod (fast-forwarding until about 30 seconds from the end) while the Shuffle was connected to my computer and in iTunes, which then caused the "Last Played" field to be updated.
The next time I connected my Shuffle, the Last Played values were updated.
I bet the Last Played was updated after you stopped playing the tracks...IN FACT. if you were watching your shuffle icon, you might have noticed the rotating thingy to the left of the eject symbol, meaning an update was ongoing.
This will happen AS LONG AS the track has "remember playback position" set.

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Sync play count, last played, and rating with iOS 5

From other threads (https://discussions.apple.com/message/16563011#16563011 and https://discussions.apple.com/message/16505730#16505730 for example) it is clear that there are some problems with play count, last played, and rating information updating and syncing under iOS 5. I have at least a partial solution. I am posting it here instead of under one of the existing threads because 1) some discussions seem to be confusing the difference between updating the iOS 5 device data and syncing the updated data to the computer, and 2) some of the discussions are focused iPhone, and though the problem appears similar I only have an iPod touch to test the solution on.
First of all, this is not a new problem. Prior to iOS 5, I would plug my iPod Touch into the computer and not see any play count or last played data for songs I knew I had just listened to. I discovered that if I clicked (in my computer's iTunes display of the iPod) on one song that I had recently listened to, it would suddenly display play count and last played for all the songs played since the last update. I could then transfer this playlist data (more on this in a minute) to the corresponding songs on the computer. Under iOS 5, this no longer works, and in fact causes the new play count and last played data on the iPod to be lost. However, under iOS 5 there is a way to get this information to update, even though you don't see it when you first connect to the computer.
To make this work, you have your iPod set on Manually manage music and videos under the Summary tab of the iPod settings in iTunes. I have messed around with this for hours, including several restores and resets of my iPod touch, and have found no way to get this to work under various Sync Music options. I have been using the Manually manage mode for years because I use my iPod with numerous different iTunes Libraries on several different external hard drives.
Here's the trick: Manually manage must be in effect before you connect the iPod to the computer. After your iPod shows up in the iTunes interface on your computer, in the main view (where it shows the different tabs at the top and capacity at the bottom) there is a Sync button at the very bottom right. Click on this and wait for it to go through the Sync steps (don't worry, you're not losing anything), and, voila, when you go to the songs (on the iPod) you have listened to since the last time you connected to the computer, the play count and last played data will be there.
Unfortunately, it's not a simple matter to get this data synced to the computer, but it can be done. At first I thought that once I got the data to show up on the iPod I could go to the Music tab and Sync Music to get the playlist data to the computer, but this does not work. It will sync the play count and last played data that are on the computer to the iPod, overriding the newer data. The way I have been getting my playlist data from my iPod to my computer without ever changing the Manually manage setting is by using the Copy Tag Info Tracks To Tracks script from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes <http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=copytinforackstotracks>. This isn't hard to download or install or use and copies playlist information very quickly.
I have never had a problem with play count or last played on my 2nd generation nano, which still works beautifully. As far as I can tell, play count and last played have never worked well on the iPod touch; there are threads in discussions complaining about this from years ago. It would be nice if Apple would recognize that these are extremely important features to many users and make it a priority to make these basics work before (or while) adding a lot of other fancy features.

Just for posterity in case anyone else ever has a similar problem.
I found out I can work around my problem, but I have limitations. The only time it'll update the correct songs is after I restore it and then add the initial songs on to the Shuffle. The key is to not ever have a situation where I reshuffle the order of those songs. If I ever shuffle to better alphebatize or categorize things, the sync updating screws everything up. If say Song #3 on my Shuffle's playlist after the intitial transfer gets moved around to being anything other than the third song played, my Shuffle/iTunes will still think that song has been played although the Song #3 I actually listened to after the sync update will be different. Now I have to carefully compose and place what songs I want loaded on since I can't mess around with the playlist setup at all.
I know Apple support would likely blame my Shuffle for the problem (it's over 6 years old now). But it's funny how this only happened right after I installed 11.0. The update to 11.0.2 did nothing.

Smart Playlists, Last Played, and Playcounts (and some other stuff)

Well, so here's my contribution to piling on with iTunes Match annoyances...
* Artwork doesn't show up during playback on iPhone until I tap <- button and then tap on Now Playing > button.
* Not Played in a year smart playlist shows 3x more songs than the source computer's iTunes library shows. I consider the source computer that synched its library to iCloud to be authoritative.
* Furthermore, the Not Played in a Year smart playlist on iPhone doesn't match what is on my iPad. 300 additional songs on the iPad.
* Repeated attempts to copy 4 songs up to iCloud fail, even though they should've been added. Can other devices see them? Yes, but they're grayed out because the track isn't copied into the cloud.
* Battery is getting chewed through on my iPhone 4. I haven't tracked it too closely, but it does seem like there's something consuming more power, and I can feel that the phone is warmer to the touch.
* Playcounts are not updated when I listen to songs on iOS or even Mac OS X-based devices. This is an absolute dealbreaker for me. While it's great to get song upgrades, I can't use iTunes Match as part of my "playflow" until playcounts and smartplaylists that incorporate last played criteria are fully supported.
It's just sooo close to being great, but without Smart Playlist support and support for playcounts, there's no point for me. I have to revert to no iTunes Match on my iOS devices for now.
C'mon Apple, get this stuff fixed. PLEASE!

Well, the good news is that I sent these list of problems to someone a little bit higher up at Apple and was very pleasantly surprised to get a call from one of the support guys within the iTunes store today.
We went over the smart playlists issue and I've hopefully given him enough detail to help him reproduce the problem internally. He's going to look to get that issue reported to the iOS team. Regardless, I think Apple knows there's work that needs to be done to fix some of these bugs/oddness we're all seeing with Match.

ITunes 9 - 'last played' and 'play count' still do not sync on manual

Tonight I upgraded to iTunes 9 and my iPod Touch to v3.1.1 but the 'improved' sync doesn't seem to have improved to what I need.
Alright, basically I have a lot of rare songs and live recordings in my library. My iPod Touch is only 16gb and my music collection is just over 99gb counting all my audiobooks. From what I can tell iTunes 9 will let me sync my music library with only select artists, but even this doesn't allow for instances where I only want four or five songs out of an artist's forty or fifty songs.
The only way to put what I want on my iPod is to set it to Manually Manage my Music and Videos. That's okay with me BUT iTunes won't sync the 'last played' and 'play count' of songs that are on my iPod and in my iTunes library.
Can someone help me solve this issue? I want to be able to manually manage my music and videos AND have iTunes sync the play count and last played for the songs I listen to.

If you manage the music on your iPod Touch manually the playcount and last played data does not get updated in iTunes. It works that way for all iPod models.
To solve this problem you can do the following:
- Create a playlist in which you add all the songs you want to add to your iPod Touch
- Set your iPod to sync music automatically. On the music tab configure the iPod Touch to only sync the previously created playlist.
- Sync your iPod Touch.
Now you can manage the content of your iPod Touch by managing the contents of the playlist and then sync. And most importantly it will update your playcount and last played data.
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Marc

My playcount, my ratings, and last played are gone

Hi, I'm new to these forums. Anyway, I was following the instructions given to me by the manual here on apple.com and I managed to transfer my songs from my old computer to my new laptop, but it did not transfer my playcount, my ratings, and last played. I'd like them back, can somebody help?

Hi, I'm new to these forums. Anyway, I was following the instructions given to me by the manual here on apple.com and I managed to transfer my songs from my old computer to my new laptop, but it did not transfer my playcount, my ratings, and last played. I'd like them back, can somebody help?

Is it possible to manually manage music on the iPod Touch and still have your last played info updated?

Hi, I'm running low on my iPod Touch capacity so have set it to 'manually manage music'. However, when on this setting, it doesn't update iTunes with 'last played' information. Is there any way to enable this? I appreciate it's not a huge issue but it is something I ike.
Thanks in advance people.

You can redownload most iTunes purchases by:
Downloading past purchases from the App Store, iBookstore, and iTunes Store

Last played and playcount function

When will this *bug* be fixed for itunes? i use my itunes to DJ and it helps greatly with letting me know how many times a song has been played and when it was last played. I use the crossfade so turning the crossfade off is not an option for me, as i have read on forums that that is the solution. any help or ideas are greatly appreciated, thanks

Turning Crossfade Songs off solved the issue for me. I have an additional observation: I just donwloaded two albums from iTunes Store: The Beatles Red and Blue Album. When playing the albums in iTunes (for Mac) in sequential (ie, non-random) order, all play counts properly increased from 0 to 1 EXCEPT for the first and last songs on each album (eg, "Yesterday!" and "Help!" in the Red Album). After truning crossfade off, the play count increased properly.
When "turning crossfade songs" back on, the play count does not increase for those first/last songs again, so I have to keep crossfade turned off permanently.

Has anyone managed to get play count/last played to sync?

I can live with the podcasts being borked, it's prompted me to use an app (hello iCatcher!) which I had been planning to do for a while. I'm still learning its ways, but it feels a lot more comfortable already.
The thing that I absolutely cannot understand is how ratings, playcount and last played times are not synchronising. I've a number of smart playlists based on these attributes and I haven't been able to get them to sync up since I enabled Match on my iPhone.
So I've got an iPhone which I sync with iTunes on a Mac. Everything's patched up to the latest version.
Has anyone successfully had any successful syncs? The smart playlists are just a joke - I'd expect the track listings to be comparable between devices, but they just aren't.
This is a beta product which some glaring functionality holes. How Apple can think it's worth paying for is beyond me. The smart playlist functionality has been working seamlessly for years on iTunes ... but it's broken. And I paid for the product that broke it. I'm feeling very let down.

I haven't managed to get any playcount, ratings etc to sync. There are so many issues with this version of iTunes Match I cannot believe Apple released it.
The order of tracks in playlists doesn't match iTunes on my Mac, selecting a folder of playlists in iTunes on my iPhone hangs the phone and sometimes crashes it, metadata doesn't sync, some albums are split into 2, etc.
Looking forward to an update soon.

Play Count / Last Played inconsistencies

I have a smart playlist that simply shows all music that I've never played.
I set this up to simply show music where Plays=0.
I've noticed recently that music I know I've listened to is still in the playlist, looking at the screenshot below you can see that I listened to this album in February but the play count is still zero?
I can get around this by also filtering out music where last played is not in the last 1000 months, but that's a workaround rather than a fix!

littlestar,
The Mimico Kid asked a couple of us on another thread if someone could offer some tips with this issue, so I'm here to try.
With playcounts that iTunes is not able to keep orderly, you may want to reset your entire iTunes library's play counts, or rebuild your iTunes library.
See if this thread is of any help for you:
Play count is screwed up- why?
Something else I just thought of that might do soemthing. Try this:
1 - Right-click "Recently played" in the left panel of iTuens, click on "Edit Smart Playlist".
2 - un-check "Live Updating".
3 - Click "OK".
4 - Play a couple of songs in the iTunes library (all you have to do is double-click a song, and drag the little location-of-the-song selector to the last couple of seconds, and it will count as a played song when it reaches the end).
5 - Close iTunes.
6 - Re-open iTeuns again.
7 - Right-click "Recently played" again, clicking on "Edit smart playlist".
8 - Now re-check "Live updating" again.
9 - Play a couple of songs in iTunes, and close iTuens when this is completed.
10 - Re-open iTunes. Play a song in it.
11 - Now, see "Recently played", just to make sure that it now shows what you played a few moments ago.
See if anything changes with iTunes not keeping your play counts.
Okay, I'm not sure if that was all useless or far-off the possible problem (I know, "Recently played" and "Live updating" may not have much to do with iTunes updating playcounts), but I guess it's a try. You sometimes never know what iTunes will positively respond to with a problem that's somewhat un-charted ground. (I've seen some strange solutions actually work with issues in iTunes).
Good luck,
-Kylene

Plays and Last Played Not Updated from Device

When I play a song from the cloud from one of my iOS devices, the Plays and Last Played fields are not updated.
This does work, however, when a song is played from a computer.
This is a deal breaker for me.
Bruce

Yup, I agree. It's looking like the only really useful thing is that iTunes Match managed to get a whole mess of my songs updated to 256Kbps versions. Not all, but a whole bunch.
Still, I rely on smart playlists with Last Played being accurate to figure out what to listen to. And, it keeps my playlist from being stale or repetitive.
I can't wait for this to be changed.

Last played data not syncing

This is the first time I've had this problem. I synced the iPod tonight (click-wheel version) and the last played data since the last sync didn't migrate into iTunes. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes without any luck, and several attempts at syncing all gave the same result.
Any suggestions? My iPod hasn't been giving me a whit of trouble that I could tell.
Windows PC, Dell Optiplex SX270 Windows XP

iTunes match has been having problems with play counts and last played data for a long time now. It actually seemed as if it was fixed before the iOS 6 release it would just take a couple days for the information to update. Sometimes it would update the play counts by 2 instead of 1... Now it seems as if it's broken again. I've been keeping my eye on a certain song I purchased Thursday and watched over the weekend. So far all that's updated is the rating and it gave it 2 play counts (I've played it around 5 times) it still does not have the last played data..
I hope they can at least get iTunes Match back to where it was before the release, at least we had some kind of update...

Last Played Data with Multiple devices

All:
My household has 2 iPod Classics used for playing music and they're both synced to the same iTunes library. I've got a ton of smart playlists that are dependant on the "last played" and "last skipped" fields to keep fresh stuff in them. Most are set to include ratings greater than 3 stars and exclude songs played or skipped in the last 3 weeks. If I listen to a track on Monday at work and sync iPod #1 that night, it'll seem to update fine with what was played that day. Then at some period later (say Wednesday) I'll sync my wife's iPod (#2). The next day at work, I'll hear the songs I heard on Monday back in my playlists.
So does the sync from iPod # 2 just flat out overwrite the existing play data from iPod #1 in iTunes even if the dates in iTunes are more recent?
Thanks!

Well I've found a workaround on some guy's blog page. It's here:
http://jimcofer.com/personal/?p=8775
I tried this and it works for the problem I was describing above. What I did isn't exactly what he was shooting for, but it works nonetheless. Here's what I did:
1. Played a few tracks on iPod #1 to create some data.
2. Played about 30 seconds of a Podcast on iPod #1.
3. Plug in iPod #1 and sync. Verify that play data is there by viewing all music sorted by Last Played field.
4. Play a few different songs on iPod #2.
5. Play about 30 seconds of a Podcast on iPod #2.
6. Plug in iPod #2 and sync.
7. Look at all music sorted by Last Played and note that tracks played by iPod #1 before the sync of iPod #2 are still showning the play data from a few minutes ago.
So apparently, you have to play a non-song item for it to "close" the database or something along those lines. Whatever. Seems hoaky, but if that's what it takes to get my smart playlists to keep ticking, I guess I do it.

IOS 6.1: Playcounts / Last played still DOA

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