Why do my play counts reset to zero randomly?

Yes Talios, I now see it is triggered by a purchase.

Over the last few days I have played music on my Mac and iOS devices daily. Each day I've synced and seen no issues.

This is what happened to me today:

1. Played music on my iPhone

2. Synced with iTunes. No problems seen.

3. Immediately downloaded this week's 'Single of The Week' from the iTunes Store.

4. This became the ONLY song in my "zero plays" playlist. So far, so normal behaviour.

5. Synced with my iPhone right away.

6. BINGO - 27 songs appeared in my "zero plays" playlist right after the synced completed!

Of those 27 songs:

A. All were iTunes purchases

B. Each has a "date last played"

C. Purchases from each year 2010, 2011, 2012.

D. Some rated, some not rated, some iTunes rated with hollow stars (i.e. no pattern)

Oh, and to add:

E. One entire album, six individual songs.

I compared the library for one of the reset songs. The entire line for play count is not there.

Before

[snip]

<key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>

<key>Play Count</key><integer>26</integer>

<key>Play Date</key><integer>3435346562</integer>

<key>Play Date UTC</key><date>2012-11-09T22:56:02Z</date>

[snip]

After

[snip]

<key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>

<key>Play Date</key><integer>3435346562</integer>

<key>Play Date UTC</key><date>2012-11-09T22:56:02Z</date>

[snip]

@GarryFromCambridge - hope you don't mind I sent the iTunes engineering team a copy of your last message. I also sent them the logs from my system.

Thank you RabbM, I hope it is of some use to the engineering team.

Garry - they want to know where you pulled the information from.

I did a File->Library->Export... before my purchase and another after the purchase and subsequent sync.

Same issue, same scenario as described.

2 full albums, 10 other singles, all show blank for playcount but still have correct info for date/time last played, added, etc. They were all things that I'd purchased from the iTunes store.

This occured after I upgraded to iTunes 11.

MacBookPro, OS 10.8.2.

Eager to hear if there is a fix or something!

So the plot thickens even further - its not even adding PURCHASED tunes - ANY song added to iTunes triggers this.

I just added a bunch of songs I got from another web-based store and added via dragging them to the "automatically add to itunes" folder and saw ANOTHER 500+ songs loose their playcount.

*sigh* my 0plays play list is now 2808 tracks!

So where does one find these fabled scripts to restore playcounts?

For those totally frustrated - a quick work around I'm using for now is updating my "zero plays" smart playlist to also include an additional clause of "last played before 1/1/1900" - all of these tracks get only their plays reset, so they last played dates are in tact.

iTunes unlike a lot of things treats "null" or "not played" as earlier than any date - so a quick filter gives me what my playlist -should- look like.

Look for now let's focus less on trying to determine the cause of this playcount reset problem and more on a solution. I just synced my ipod and 2 more iTunes purchases lost their playcounts. So what can we do to restore our playcounts that have already been lost? Additionally I think I may've corrupted my library by restoring it to an earlier time in Windows because my "Recently Played" list no longer updates when I sync my ipod unless I click "Sync". Can my library be fixed?

Hi,

I've just joined this forum as I've been getting the same problem.

I don't use play counts in the way that some of you guys seem to, but it's still really annoying. Reading through all of the posts, I picked up on something someone said, so I tried this -

Edit > Preferences > Store

Then I unticked the 4 boxes in the bottom half of the main box (Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases, etc) and since then the play counts have stayed in place, iTunes hasn't overridden any of the manual changes I've made to song titles etc.

Obviously, if those 4 options are critical to how you use iTunes and the rest of the stuff, they're not going to be of much use to you, but they seem to be working for me.

Just for info, I'm a bit of a dinosaur - on a 5yo desktop running XP, not on the new fangled Windows 7 or 8 yet and even though I'd love on, can't afford an Apple Mac or whatever they're called.

I made these same changes last Sunday and I have had now issues so far of iTunes overwriting things. Fingers crossed

Talios - there's a link in my second post to the script to manualy adjust play counts. HTH

Cheshireman, could you confirm for us have you actually purchased anything since you switched off all those options?