iPhone sync's Rating, but not Play Count

I can vouch for this theory regarding play-count increments and the form of usage with the iphone. I played the last minute of a concert video on three different days. 1. I played it and my phone locked up and I rebooted - no increment and the selection was not removed from my smartplaylist. 2. I played the ending of the same file in my car attached to a car charger - same results. 3. I played it from battery and updated iphone - last play data was for today and the selection was replaced on update with an unplayed selection. Hope this helps

Count me in as having this problem too. Used to work fine. Between this and the mail problems, 2.0 has been a major pain.

Same thing in 2.0.1, apparently. Still not working. I sure hope someone reads this and prioritizes fixing this. The playlist membership shouldn't affect updating of play counts and last played time at all, so this is clearly a bug. And this topic is definitely not answered.

Anyone checked this at 2.0.2? Thanks.

I also find that the ratings update but not the actual playcount. I purchased an album on iPhone & listened to it in full however when synced I had apparently listened to 3 tracks. I have a smart playlist on both iPhone 3G and a nano, what I fail to understand is why the nano can update play counts no problem but the more advanced iPhone can't do it. I hope apple can resolve this issue!

i have also been having the same problems for the last 10 days or so.. and it is definatly not because of this theory about the smart playlists.. all the music i have on my iphone is featured in at least one smart playlist -i have a system that makes sure this happens.. still only 50% of the play counts get registered.. yesterday my iphone froze for like 30sec while i was listening to music, and only the songs played after that got registered as played.. but today i have had no problems like that, no reboots or anything, and still all the play counts from my way to work this morning, did not show up in itunes when i synced this afternoon, only the ones from my way home from work showed up..

Am having the same problems with play count. I'm having the same issues described above when I use my iPhone with my car adapter and when I turn it off and re-start it, which is annoying, but I can (sort of) work around that. My biggest problem is that I'm also having issues with play count when I switch over to an application that causes my iPod to lose track of where it was in my playlist. That is even more annoying because it's harder to control for it, unless I use my iPhone exclusively as an iPod, which is NOT what I bought it for!!!

Arrrrgh! Very frustrating. Apple, fix this ASAP!!! What's the point of saying that the iPhone is the world's most powerful iPod when it can't even do something as simple as keep track of play counts?? This makes no sense.

I have been struggling with the same issue regarding podcasts. My sync settings are to sync unplayed episodes of podcasts, but MANY episodes appear on my iPhone that I have played. Sometimes the played count is accurately updated in iTunes and sometimes not.

By trial and error, I found two significants pieces of the puzzle. First, if you power off or reset the iPhone before syncing, the information is lost. Second, you have to allow the play to run through the very end to have it count. Skipping to the end does not count.

I did register a bug report on this but the Apple engineers say it is working as designed.

I HAVE THE ANSWER

Make sure that on your iPhone Sync Page, you have the box that says "Sync only checked songs and videos"

This will let your play count increase when you play on your iPhone

If this works, bless you kind sir. Talk about an annoying issue.

Your fix didn't work for me unfortunately. I'm running 2.1.

Getting the playcount to move over from the iphone to itunes is very doable.

I keep a playlist in my itunes that i use to put all the music i want synced onto the iphone, you can choose this from the music tab in your iphone settings. Make sure manual management of music and videos is unchecked, and sync the playlist. Voila. This should also work if you don't use a playlist and can sync your entire library onto the iphone, basically as long as you're automatically syncing.

Now test it out by playing a song on your iphone, you can skip to the end just let it play onto the next song, and sync once more. The playcount should be updated in itunes.

Cheers.

Yes, it has always worked this way, but there is a bug preventing it from working for some of us. However, I'm working towards a fix. I restored my iPhone and did NOT use a backup. I set up everything as if it were new -- not that time consuming actually.

I then played songs, skipped songs, etc. from my smart playlist (songs rated 4 or 5 stars that I have not played in 90+ days). The sync worked for play count and last played. Now for the next test -- playing the smart playlist, and then playing other playlists, rebooting the iPhone, etc. -- to see if it loses play count data because of one of these actions. I'll report back.

Nope. Restoring didn't help and the bug is actually worse than I originally thought. I listened to a smart playlist. After that, I rated some new songs in a different smart playlist. When I synced, the ratings and plays/date from the last playlist I listened to transferred, but my plays/date from the other playlist did not. It seems the workaround is to listen to only one smart playlist if you want to sync the play metadata. That's unacceptable.

Unfortunately, most iPhone owners probably don't use smart playlists or care about play/date metadata. I guess the only "good" news about the 2.1 update is that Safari still crashes a lot so perhaps 2.2 is around the corner.

Message was edited by: technolawyer