Syncing my iPhone 4 will not update iTunes play counts

What I would do in that situation is go in to each song in my iTunes and continually click it to about :02 sec left in the song and get each playcount to where it's supposed to be. It's terrible and will take a long time, but I'm psycho. Cause yes, you will lose all the data we want.

I clicked "Apply" before actually beginning to add music, I don't know if that will make a difference.

hi Mike,

I did have the Manage music unclicked and in the Music tab the sync music with playlist, genere selected.I have my playlist having the play count, but the one that has higher playcount is shown at the end rather in the front. I also clicked the "Play tab" in my itunes to have the highest count to be shown first. Although Itunes shows it, but after the sync my iphone has the highest play count song deeb below. Since my playlist holds almost 300 songs, I have to scroll down each time to the highest count song and this drives me nuts.

This is used to work like a charm untill I upgraded to IOS5. since most of my high count songs are either my feel good songs or workout songs, I miss that functionality which was before IOS5.

any suggests to bring the highest count songs to the top just below the Shuffle tab.

Thanks

Hi everyone,

I've found a workaround that seems to be working for me.

ipod 2G stopped syncing with itunes 10.5 upgrade like most everyone else.

I manually fill it with unlistened to music from a playlist that has more tunes than the ipod will hold.

Here's what I do,

Uncheck manually sync music & video's

Click apply

When the sync status gets to "Determining tracks to sync"

Check manually manage again then apply.

All the play counts from the ipod are now updated with the itunes DB.

Pain in the *** but it works for now

The behaviour has been changed (or broken), and Playcount works only with Auto-Sync Music (tested with iOS 5.0.1 probably works with 5.0 as well), not sure when Apple will fix this, but i am starting to use Auto-Sync for now (until they fix it)... i am still able to manage the music properly on windows itunes i can drag the music from my library like i would with Manually sync... but with Auto-Sync your playlists are easier to manage as it'll be in sync.

Definitely had success with Mike's fix. I'd avoided the auto music sync for long cause I didn't want to lose music I had forgotten to transfer. I mostly just had an iPhone music list that I updated to make sure only songs I wanted were on the phone anyway, so... turns out this saves me a lot of hassle anyway by just syncing that playlist automatically and nothing else...

Don't forget to turn on ringtone syncing too, though, if you do this.

Kudos to you, sir.

I've been having the same problem - but I just FOUND A FIX that worked for me, and so might work for others.

The problem was with iCloud - even though iTunes is NOT set up to sync using iCloud.

The details: when I activated my phone it said it was sending me an email to set up iCloud - but I never received that email (I've tried to resend it a few times). It's possible I told my phone to sync using iCloud when I set it up. So even if you DO have iCloud set up, it's possible your phone thinks it is syncing over iCloud while iTunes thinks it is not (since this is an option in iTunes that you can view and change when you plug your phone in).

The fix: On my phone I went to Settings --> iCloud. At the bottom was an option to "delete iCloud account". I did this (and chose the option to keep iCloud data on my phone, just in case). After that the sync is working perfectly, updating my play counts and last played, scrobbling to last.fm and all.

Possible alternative fix ??: If you have iCloud set up, check and see if you have "sync using iCloud" checked / try checking it and see if that fixes it.

I have: iPhone 4s with 5.0.1, Windows with iTunes 10.5.1.42. Both are the most current updates avaliable as of this post. My phone is NOT set up to manually manage, it IS set up to back up to my computer (not icloud), and NOT over wifi. The only option I have set is to only sync checked music and videos.

As soon as I read this I knew it was the right fix, thanks.

This did not work for me, I'm afraid

I think this is a new bug with iOS 5. I have several iOS 5 devices and have checked with friends. For whatever reason, with the new software playcounts do not update like they used to. All of my friends are experiencing this problem. Also, my friends who are still using iOS4 are not having this problem. With the new software the phone seperates the songs from the computer. It used to be that you could plug your iphone into any computer and drag and drop the songs from your iphone to that computer or vice versa like a USB. But with iOS 5 Apple has blocked this feature.

Unfortunately, I do not think this is a big enough problem to catch Apple's attention so it most likely won't get fixed and will stay this way.

I have managed to fix it by turning off wifi and cloud sync all together and toggling one of my syncing smart playlists off, syncing, and then on again.

Everything seems to be working after several tests and after a couple of weeks. The key seems to be that it only works if you are syncing via USB.

It makes sense in an odd sort of way. Imagine how long wifi sync would take if your songs changed dramatically. It should be made explicit though, or if it's a bug, it should be fixed.

Well, I tried all of the suggestions and I'm still unable to sync songs. Has anybody actually called apple support to hear what they say? If I had my applecare still, I would totally do that. But since I'm expired, I can't get phone help.

I have the exact same problem, with a twist: My iPad works great, no sync problems at all. My iPhone has all the symptoms in this thread, plus another that it won't sync updated apps. (Trying to save bandwidth, this is what tipped me off at first.) I've gone through both to no end, reset various things in the phone, completely disabled iCloud, and can't see any differences between them, yet syncs just don't work for the phone while the pad has no issues.

OK PEOPLE. I Fixed Mine.

here is what ive done:

1. as i was so ****** off with my music counts and albumarts i switched to android. but getting endless apps and i tunes syncers i go so tired of it. i just couldnot handle another day with out my iphone.first of all ive realised that android sucked even though it had 1ghz cpu and loads of ram. it was constantley crashing but let me get back to the point.

2. i got my iphone 3gs back and restored it to factory and did setup as new iphone.

during onscreen setup ive skipped settingup or entering apple id and ive skipped icloud .

once ive imported contacts bookmarks etc. from acounts ve gone through music sync.

itunes> iphone> summary page only thing i have selected is sync iphone to this computer and sync only ticked songs.

then i went to music tab and selected (sync music,> selected playlists ,music videos etc.

and after if you drag and drop music manualy in to iphone it will sync its rateing music play counts and all changes that youve ever made on iphone/ipod

here is my screenshots

1. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/155/41920647.png/

2. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/36/29860743.png/

3. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/841/34469557.png/

i am so happy to be back to my iphone you cant even imagine. hope this fix will work for you all.

i have not tried backup as i had nothing to loose. if you have anything to loose plz backup everything before you attempt to do any of this.

good luck.

I called Apple Support today and was told that with the latest update, iTunes has removed the Play Counts feature. This is why it has stopped updating on our iPhones I suppose. :-( Has anyone else heard this?