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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.
Hope this helps,
Marc