Syncing my iPhone 4 will not update iTunes play counts

Thats BS. The play count column is clearly still there in iTunes. This is not an intentional decision, it's just a shoddy oversight.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you - that worked. I have Selected Playlists ticked to sync. I bought a couple of iTunes songs today via my iPhone and couldn't understand why when I got home the plays I played that day hadn't registered even after I synced. The only playlist that wasn't ticked was "Purchased" so that fixed the problem 😎

thanks to whoever suggested deleting iCloud! I deleted it and synced my iPod and viola! My play counts had been updated like they had before.

Unfortunately in my Settings on my iPhone 4 the iCloud does not have the option to delete at the the bottom

I ended up finding that I just had to untick the "Sync with this iPhone over Wifi", the second box in the Summary - Options, but I still have "Back Up to iCloud" ticked, so when I connect the phone to my computer it will automatically sync (the old fashioned way!) and all the Play Counts automatically update, and back up. I think the sync over wifi is causing the problem. I found that annoying anyway as it was constantly syncing which isn't necessary.

It doesn't have Delete Account underneath the Storage and Backup?

Having the same problem and a few others on my iPod Touch with iOS 5.0.1 and now 5.1 with iTunes 10.5.3 and Snow Leopard. I have a playlist to find new songs (playcount = 0 and some songs that were new a 2 months ago are stuck on that list even though they have been played several times and are not in that playlist in iTunes because the playcounts did change. Tried some other fixes for "live updating" issues I saw elsewhere and those didn't fix it.

Downloaded some new songs the other day and played them on my iPod classic. Noticed today that they were still on the playlist on the iPod Touch and in iTunes even though both iPods had been synced since then and I know they updated properly on the iPod classic as the playlist was empty before I synced it. I found this thread today so it made me think syncing over wifi or using iCloud might be the problem. However I already weeks ago turned off syncing over wifi on my iPod Touch because it was so slow but not for my iPad.

So I tried a couple things and ended up deleting my iCloud account and turning off wifi syncing on both the iPad and iPod. Resynced everything and the playlist still had the recently downloaded songs on it and the older ones that were correct in iTunes. I played one of the newest songs on my iPod classic and it updated in iTunes and on my iPod touch. So this partially fixed the problem. Thanks for the help. I suspect when I play songs now they will update properly but those older songs are still out of sync with iTunes. Will have to keep experimenting.

Update to my previous post: Apparently I had a couple of issues likely caused by iCloud. After making my prior post I noticed that the total number of songs according to iTunes didn't match the total number on my iPod Touch - about 67 more on the iPod. A similar number but not the same number as the number of songs stuck in my playcount = 0 playlist. So I decided I would just wipe all of the music off it and start over. I unchecked "Sync Music" and synced it to remove, or so I thought, all music from the iPod.

After that was done I noticed there were still 83 songs left on it. I didn't closely check them all out but they all looked like recently added music (since starting iCloud probably) and many matched the ones stuck on my playlist. The 83 were apparently duplicates. So I manually deleted them off the iPod, rechecked "Sync Music", resynced and the total numbers now matched. Since then play counts and that playlist appear to be updating correctly from both iPods.

I'll stay away from iCloud for long while.

I agree Scott X! At first I thought it was just the syncing over WiFi causing my play count problem, but I think iCloud is hopeless and definitely causing problems. I haven't deleted my iCloud account but I am not using it at the moment, much prefer to "Back up to this computer". I have had no problems with play counts at all since turning off iCloud. When they first came out with iCloud I thought it was too soon, it's like problems weren't ironed out first, so I too will stay away from iCloud until I find out it's working properly.