Why do my play counts reset to zero randomly?

This has been going on, since, what? November? It's now late Feburary, This is a huge company, they can't get a bug fix out given several months? What is wrong at Apple HQ? Too hopped up on cappacinos and frozen yogurts to fix anything? Or is this a "feature" rather than a "bug"? Are we supposed to not be able to have accurate play counts and have the great hand of Apple computer reach out of the sky and alter our genres and album titles and so forth?

I've had my itunes cut off from Apple's servers for months now to avoid that. In that time, all my music purchases have come from other companies. They've lost my money until they learn to respect my personal property- i.e. the music I've purchased- enough to let me set genres, album names, artist names, track numbers, etc. and leave them be- and enough to stop zeroing out play counts randomly.

They think they know what's best and force it down the end users' throat. Before, I thought I had a PC because I couldn't afford a Mac. Now, I'd have a PC even if I were a billionaire. Same when it comes to phones- I'd stick with cheap Android phones even if iphones started to compete in the inexpensive prepaid market segment- before it was because of financial necessity, now it's simply because I don't trust Apple anymore. They've lost my business when it comes to buying music, too. Frankly, I got an ipod as a gift a few months ago, so they've got that money, and it's a good device (As was the one I'd bought 4-5 years prior that eventually bit the dust), but if I ever upgrade my computer or something and can't use itunes without accessing their servers and having them screw things up the way I've been able to jury rig this version, I'll be switching software to use with that ipod, and if some other company would gets off their rear ends and creates a high capacity MP3/AAC player, in a few years when it comes time to replace this ipod, I'll switch there, too.

I can't use things like genius or the store for fear that Apple will go back to screwing up my library. Advertised features that now don't work unless you let Apple pillage your music library and change and erase things at it's whim.

Apple needs to start respecting it's users more. Stop changing our files. Let us keep our genres, album, and track titles. FIX THE PLAY COUNT BUG also. Yeesh, how long do they expect people to wait? Maybe in 2014?

Well, this playcount thing has become a complete joke for me. I just followed jet9football's instructions after seeing my playcounts get erased for 40 random songs ranging between 2006 and 2012. Maybe I did something wrong but I now have 68 songs without playcounts with the original 40 I wanted to restore still stuck at zero. Any suggestions? Like everyone else, most of my playlists are playcount and date played dependent. I'm just trying to figure out how I can stop this once and for all or, at the very least, restore my previous library so that I can begin the tedious process of exporting things each time I quit iTunes. After deleting the .itl file and dropping in the most recent file (renaming it), I open iTunes and for about a second see my "Never Played" playlist as having zero songs. Then it quickly populates back to 68, including the 40 that appeared this morning.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks alot

You have to turn off the option to Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases (iTunes > Preferences > Store). That is what's causing the problem. So turn it off until (if?) Apple fixes it.

I suffered from daily play count resets of various songs, sometimes around 60 affected tracks at a time, when I first upgraded to iTunes 11. I turned off this option and have not had any resets since.

With all due respect, that's not the only thing that triggers zeroed out playcounts, which you would know if you'd read the thread. We've had contact with and purchases from the itunes store trigger it, possibly genius updates as well, etc.. I turned off the option to show cloud purchases within minutes of downloading itunes 11, never turned it back on, and had playcounts zeroing out weeks later. Any contact with Apple's servers seems to put people at risk. And this is a Windows problem as well as a Mac problem. Almost four months later, Apple has done nothing about it, unless the latest update fixes it, and how would anyone know, because they fail to give a comprehensive list of bug fixes- yuck.

My sincerest apologies for not memorizing every reply in the thread. iTunes store purchases have not affected my play counts; I have made many since turning off that option with no ill effects.

Genius data, however, might be a culprit as well. I have had that turned off for a very long time because it caused me nothing but problems in syncing my devices.

Has anyone been able to confirm if the 11.0.2 update fixes this problem or not?

@mluton

I updated my iTunes earlier today, and unfortunately the new update has not fixed this problem.

Well, I tried to manually recreate some of the counts as best as I could and just gave up on the rest. Anyway, I was hoping some people could explain their methodology for backing up/protecting the data while this bug continues to exist. I've shut off genius and "show itunes in the clound purchases" in hopes that it will minimize the chance of my data getting ruined over and over. Beyond that, is the best plan to simply make a copy of the .itl file upon exit each time and use that backup file as needed? Do I also need to export the library to a .xml file? And if so, do I need to replace both the .itl file and .xml file when attempting to recover corrupted data? Any tips/insight would be great. Thanks everyone.

For those of you still having trouble with this issue:

When you follow jet9football's instructions, you are using the .itl file from the "Previous iTunes Libraries" folder, correct? The files in this folder seem to only be created when you update iTunes. You have to make sure you use the file from when you updated from iTunes 10.x to 11.0. If you're using one of the files from iTunes 11, the bug will persist.

If you are doing that and following the directions, I'm not sure what else to try. Since I followed those steps, I haven't had the issue crop up even a single time.

Actually, it's hit and miss. I have had the issue creep up time and time again even using those instructions. I have tried various settings in preferences and multiple other things. While it has worked well for some of the machines I have worked on it has not completely "fixed" the issue. On one of my personal machines the issue is alive and well. It has worked well on two friends machines though. It appears to be dependent on the size and type of library. My machine deals much more with video than with audio. In fact, I only have about 16 Gb of music total and most of it was purchased elsewhere or ripped from Cds. I do however have multiple Terabytes of video with a good majority being iTunes purchases. Your "fix" seems to work well with music libraries as far as I can tell but poorly on video libraries. Of course, this is only an observation with a few machines dealing with multiple variables and not scientific fact. I have sent Apple a good deal of information on this until about three weeks ago when they told me that they required no more data. When pressed, they told me that they have no idea what caused this or how to fix it but that was about three weeks ago.

I've been experiencing the same problem - since installing iTunes 11.0, random songs in my library have had their play counts reset - sometimes individual songs and sometimes entire albums (though they still have a 'last played' date). These have all been songs purchased from iTunes between 2009 and 2012, and it could well have been triggered by my purchasing new songs from iTunes. I've been fiddling around with various settings, though I'm yet to see if it's worked - I'm now scared to buy anything new from iTunes!

I'm really annoyed because up until now all my songs had accurate play counts and I liked to be able to list them in order and see which songs I'd most been listening to. Glad it's not just me experiencing the problem (no offence). Hope Apple sorts this out soon, it's not on.

Going to Preferences > Store and unchecking all four of the boxes on the bottom of that area has completely stopped the problem for me. I did this a few months ago. I have made purchases at the Store in that time and have not had the problem recur. I am convinced the whole problem is due to having one/all of those boxes in Store Preferences checked.

I am in a state of much distress. I just noticed that this happened to about a fourth of my purchased tracks. My gosh. I spend hours (dayyyyys) organizing my library based on play count. I can't work with Play Count wipes. How ridiculous this is. I just bought a bunch of albums from iTunes. Shouldn’t have, I guess. And people say CDs are going away. Hah.

So... angry.....

(I updated to iTunes 11 right at the beginning. Can't tell when the plays were reset, but now I'm on iTunes 11.0.2. I only turned off 'Show iTunes in the Cloud Purchases' a couple months ago so don't know if that was the culprit for me. After reading some suggestions in the thread I unchecked 'Sync playback information across devices'. I'm hoping it does mess up my stuff anymore.)

I discovered this problem in early January, and after much bother found this thread (and other discussions), implemented the suggestions here, at much expense of my time (restoring backed up version of iTunes, which of course created all sorts of other glitches), only to find now in early March that a bunch more iTunes purchases had been reset to zero play counts.

I find it hard to believe that they are trying to fix this problem. They do have people capable of reading English and thus following the user forums?

I had evidently unchecked three of the four boxes but not "Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases" (whatever the **** that means) -- or maybe I did uncheck it and they defaulted it back to checked on my last update (although I don't know when that was, since I try to avoid updating). For all I know they can change my settings regardless of whether I update.

I have now unchecked all four. See if that helps. I am not particularly hopeful.

(And by the way I hate the way the new layout doesn't allow me to switch back and forth betwee the full music list and a playlist without losing my place and ending up at the start of the list. Why can these software companies not stick with a good thing once they've found it?? The tyranny of "the new.")

It is pretty pathetic that such a large company with so many workers and such a large pile of money is still leaving this problem unaddressed after so many months and several small updates. I'd expect more from a two-man independent software company, even. No excuse for this whatsoever. Apple looks incredibly bush league and like they don't give a darn about their users.