Why do my play counts reset to zero randomly?

this is not a solution but might be of interest to others:

i had the same happen to me. playcounts re-set to zero, even though there was a 'last played' date.

REALLY annoying as i use a 'top 50 played' smart playlist to make sure favourite tracks are copied across to my iphone.

even though i back up every four weeks, my last backup also contained the error so i can't retrieve the play counts.

there is a way to see which tracks have been affected by setting up the following smart playlist:

match all the following rules:

plays is 0

last played is after 23/3/2006 (any old date will do).

doing this will give you a list of all those tracks that have been re-set to zero. at least then you can see the extent of the damage.

how apple have not fixed this bug is astonishing.

surely the data is still stored somewhere?! otherwise the 'last played' entry wouldn't be there....?

I did the same thing when the problem first happened to me. I have not had any more problems, but others may also be interested in my current backup solution. If you go to the song lost view and hit command a it will select all your songs. Hit command c to copy. Open excel and paste the data here. Whatever fields you had shown will copy over. I do this every few days now.

Has Apple released a fix for the zero play count bug yet? What about the way they were changing genres, album names, and track numbers to match what was in their store library without user permission and reverting the changes users made?

I've been a bit out of the loop, because I turned off the itunes store, genius, Apple being allowed to view my library, and all other related options many months ago to keep itunes from connecting to Apple's servers and zeroing playcounts and changing genres and such. I also turned off all updates for the same reason. It'd be nice if I could update and turn some of those features back on, but I'm not going to do so until such a time as they fix these bugs or remove these "new features" or whatever it is. So I thought I'd check in and see if any progress has been made on those fronts.

I should probably mention that I am using Itunes for Windows. I'm asking for updates on the situation over here instead of over in the Windows discussion area because you folks seem more on top of these specific issues. There are a ton of complaints about Itunes 11 over there, some even specifically the issues we're concerned about, but there's also a lot of "Who? What? That's not happening! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." when these specific real issues are raised. A lot fewer advances users, I think. Mainly they're complaining about user interface changes, which are legitimate issues to raise, but not something I care nearly as much about as I care about having accurate play counts that don't zero out and being able to keep my decisions about genres, album titles, track numbering and so forth intact.

Hi guys, exact same problem as everyone else is happening to my itunes library, and as I'm really OCD about my play counts it's really annoying me!

Is there any sure way solution to solve this? Or have apple just screwed us over?

Yes, I think Apple have screwed us and they don't appear to give a flying f**k about their customers really.

The only way that I know of, and it's discussed way up the list on this topic, is to go into Edit on iTunes, then Preferences, then select Store ad untick the 4 boxes at the bottom half of the box.

This effectively stops all communications between iTunes on your PC and Apple. If you're OK with this, give it a try. I did it a while ago and I've had no issues since then.

Martin

Hey i really need to know exactly why this is happening i have had my play count reset before and i was mainly shocked and then got use to it every week but then Today I turn on Itunes and i See More then 300 Of My Songs Reset Some with plays over 100!

Why might i ask is this happening and how can i Fix it?

I have noticed that since the recent change to Itunes this has happened!

Also does anyone know how to quickly get the amou tof plays back to the right amount because it kills the fingers having to do it maunally?

All i know is this probelm has finally got to me in the Biggest way 10 songs is nothing but OVER 300 Songs set to Zero Is going to far!

Curtis

Bumping this, because it's still a problem in iTunes 12, 3 years after this thread started. Clearly, Apple has just given up on fixing bugs in iTunes. I have about 10,000 songs, and 1,800 of them have a zero play count. Many others have 1 or 2, because I didn't notice this right away, and I know those were reset, too. Many of them have more than 2 stars, so clearly I've listened to them at least a few times. I have several hundred playlists in iTunes, and iTunes Match to keep my iPhone & iPad in sync with my Mac; but it's getting to the point where I'm looking for alternatives. I don't want to pay monthly for a streaming service, and so far the alternatives don't have all the features I want, so for now I'm stuck just putting up with Apple's mediocre software, hoping they'll fix it some day. I just turned off the "plays" column, and I guess I'll have to go without it from now on. But, man, what a (seemingly) simple bug that's gone unfixed, and that's really frustrating.

I couldn't agree more with you.

Me too - I don't think I had this problem before, but I just realized that many of the tracks I've purchased in iTunes have had their play counts reset to zero. I believe this happened during my three-month trial subscription to Apple Music - I knew that lots of metadata in those files got messed up, but I only just noticed that many of the play counts were also reset. But there's also a possibility this has happened since my Apple Music subscription ended, a month or two ago I guess - I thought I'd gone through and fixed the metadata alterations, but I've just had to spend a few hours doing that (again? or for issues I hadn't noticed before?). I do not use, and have never used, iTunes Match.

For what it's worth, all of these plays = zero tracks still have a last played date recorded. The reset is oddly random - I've got plenty of albums with play counts like 17, 17, 17, 0, 17, 0, 17, 0, 0, 17. The ones that are reset to zero are also almost always the ones with messed up metadata.

Very annoying. So much for all those playlists based on most played, least played, and so on.

I have been using last.fm to track all my play counts for years, so I still have a record there. It's not all that helpful if those play counts aren't in iTunes though. Does anyone know of a way to migrate those back into iTunes without manually editing each individual song in the xml file?

It's annoying isn't it. I noticed some unusual numbers in my play counts a while back and my theory was that it was connected to failed syncs from my iPhone. It also created lots of playlists. For example, let's say I have a playlist called Christmas. Well, I noticed one day that iTunes had created Christmas 1, Christmas 2, Christmas 3, Christmas 4, Christmas 5. And for some of the songs in that playlist, the play counts were way over what I knew they should be. Luckily, because I'd been saving historical copies of my iTunes library file, I could go back and work out that the true true play count for a particular at one time was 8. The each time I had synced, there was a new playlist called Christmas 1 and the songs play count was 16. Then a few days later after another sync, Christmas 2 playlist suddenly appears and the songs play count was now 24. And so on. Restoring the phone put an end to that.

Interesting - in my case, I haven't had any duplicated playlists. For what it's worth, I use almost exclusively smart playlists - I don't know if that makes a difference. And I haven't noticed any songs with play counts increasing almost exponentially (I vaguely recall that happening seven or eight years ago). However, I have seen that happen with audiobooks - my audiobook files will have plays of 4, and then 8, but seeing as how it's an audiobook I'm usually quite sure I haven't listened to it more than once!

Ah, yes, you've just reminded me! My issue with the duplicates playlists was that my actual playlist was a smart one, and the duplicates were the non-smart type. I have one audiobook, listened to it twice: play count is around 47! I'd assumed it was the sum of the counts of each chapter and since I'd fallen a asleep a few times and rewound at my next session, I've rolled-over from one chapter to the next quite a few times.