Why iPhone does not sync play count anymore?

I agree. I have always LOVED this fature and use it to manipulate and create many playlists.

But here is a twist: My syncing of playcount worked until 5:00 pm November 3rd. I have made NO changes to any settings or software since then. It just stopped tranmitting that information.

Don't know if this info helps or hurts. There is a part of me that is just glad it is not just me...

I think I'm in the same boat as Davehp. I bought a song last week, listened to it a few times, synced, then listened to it some more over the weekend. The playcount is stuck at 4, whereas I've definitely listened to it more times than that (and tested listening to it then syncing afterwards - no change).

Just to add some confusion to the mix, my music is managed automatically and always has been. All based on smart lists, ratings and play counts.

Shockingly, starting yesterday morning . . . play data is updating again. Maybe it had a 72 hour flu? I didn't change a single setting either before the syncing stopped or before it started again...

I'm having the same problem. I'm having all sorts of problems since I updated to iOS5 and iTunes 10.5.

I heartily recommend that everyone posting problems on this thread post a complaint to Apple:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

That's the best way to get Apple to fix these problems.

michaelaston wrote:

Just to add some confusion to the mix, my music is managed automatically and always has been. All based on smart lists, ratings and play counts.

Interesting, my iPhone 4 auto-syncs my play history just fine with iOS 5 and iTunes 10.5. I don't pay attention to play count, but Last Played date certainly does update -- I keep an eye on that vs. my Last.fm listening history.

The only glitch I've seen with this since iOS 5 is when I purchased an album from my iPhone it seemed to "forget" the plays since my last auto-sync but before the purchase, but everything after the purchase updated fine on my next auto-sync. I chalked this up as a hiccup, but maybe it's repeatable anytime there is a big demand for memory, including certain app usage?

I have two devices, an iPhone and an iPod Nano. I have always used auto-sync to manage my playlists and I noticed that the play count/last played became sporadic around the time I started syncing the iPhone. Could it be that iTunes isn't smart enough to keep track of the same songs on different devices? That seems a little too simple a cause.

I'm going to try creating a new playlist for the iPhone and seeing how that handles.

I had trouble with my iPad, I know I'd been playing the songs on it quite a lot, but the playcount had stopped syncing to iTunes. The only fix I found was to back up my iPad and then do a full Restore. It worked because now it will sync the playcounts over, but only the plays that have happened since I did the restore. The restore takes a while. I've only just fixed it today though, so I hope it doesn't break again soon!

Same problem here. Manually managed playlist, playcounts used to update fine. Now they don't. Switching to automatically synced playlist to see if it will fix the problem. If that doesn't work, I'll try turning on homeshare through the iPhone itself. That will easily take up my 5 devices allowed on homeshare though 😟

You have to Auto Sync Music in order for Playcounts to work i just tested on iOS 5.0.1. They removed the manually manage music & playcount that was there for like ages on iPhone... The only change is the split to Music / Video apps that along would've triggered the change.

So the solution for the moment is... there is no solution. You either use smart playlists, do the auto-matic sync between your phone and your computer, or you just accept that your playcounts and last played will be different between your phone and itunes.

Seems kind of silly to me. I like the idea of manually managing what songs from my library are on my phone. I like having updated and accurate information for my playing history, so I can make sure that I don't just listen to the same stuff over and over again.

It bothers me that Apple would try to pigeonhole me into giving up on one of those two things. This functionality has been on iPods for as long as I've used iPods (dating back to the first generation iPod shuffle). If I felt like I had to have a seperate device for my music than my phone, I never would have bothered getting a phone as expensive as the iPhone.

I used to manually manage my music and I switched to auto-sync to get the playcounts syncing.

The thing is, you can easily manage your music manually while using auto-sync. Simply create a playlist, and only sync that playlist with your phone (instead of your whole library). Then you just add and remove songs from that playlist and let iTunes automatically sync it. You can manually manage your music and the playcounts sync with your library.

Now when I look back, I have no idea why I was manually managing my music. Playlist syncing is much easier.

while it is easier that auto-sync will only keep 1 copy of the song, no longer when you're not sure about which song you have copied over it'll only have 1 copy of the song in retrospective that should hve been the default behavior of manulaly mangement music anyway.. it is probably extremely rare for someone wanting the same song duplicated.

The problem is you can't easily delete songs... Since iOS 5 that let you to delete, every time i delete something on the iOS device, and do a sync later the songs/albums i deleted kept syncing back! really annoying Since there is no option like Apps does, it doesn't transfer over if you don't want to.

Also i can't sort in iTunes on my iPhone 4S device when Auto-sync, it somehow stuck on sorting on PlayCount (that was what is on before i changed to auto-sync) and i can't change it... of course that list is where i delete my music manually and 100x better than the checkerbox interface which is extremely slow.

All that compromise with positive points like Playlist management which is much much easier... But wish they fix the no-sorting bug (its not even greyed out), and they could have the delete song and don't sync back option, that it self is really annoying for most people especially in the era of PC Free... Also why do i need to sync still? because i typically buy music from CD (way better quality) if iTunes start to offer lossless i'll consider it 😝

Here's a problem with autosyncing: (by the way anyone who has a current solution let me know). I use a smart playlist--->playcount =0. That way I go through all of my music before repeating a song. The problem is, that this playlist will NOT automatically update on my iphone until each time that I sync with the mac. This is despite having checked live updating when I created it. SO.......unless I want to sync with my mac every day, the smart playlist remains unchanged. Once I sync, the songs I have played (on the mac OR the iphone) are pulled out of the iphone smartplaylist. Since I can't sync every day this leads to problems.

Brian Drachman wrote:

Here's a problem with autosyncing: (by the way anyone who has a current solution let me know). I use a smart playlist--->playcount =0. That way I go through all of my music before repeating a song. The problem is, that this playlist will NOT automatically update on my iphone until each time that I sync with the mac. This is despite having checked live updating when I created it. SO.......unless I want to sync with my mac every day, the smart playlist remains unchanged. Once I sync, the songs I have played (on the mac OR the iphone) are pulled out of the iphone smartplaylist. Since I can't sync every day this leads to problems.

Live Updating on the device has been fouled up ever since iOS 3.0 was released. I made use of Live Updating religiously and this f-up has been a gripe of mine ever since I updated my 2G Touch -- and here it is 3 years later Apple still has not fixed this feature, which was one of the coolest things about iPods.

Before anyone roasts me on this, under very limited situations you can get a smart playlist to update without connecting to iTunes, but once you add the criteria "Playlist Is ..." then all bets are off. Maybe things worked a little better if you manually-managed, but from those who use smart playlists I've never heard it said that it works just fine in manual mode.

Sadly, Apple seems to have no interest in fixing this feature despite numerous reports by me with each and every iOS release since 3.0. Add your voice to the mix, maybe with enough chatter we can get some attention ...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

(and you might as well add to http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipodtouch.html)

When I used to use my iPod Touch 1G with automatic syncing, I never had this problem. I recently bought an iPod Touch 4G using iOS 5.0.1 and still didn't have a problem. Since last week my play counts wouldn't sync back anymore, so I tried resetting the play counts on all my songs and that fixed it. Since I'm rebuilding my library from the ground up, I didn't really care about losing play counts, but if I had to lose years' worth of play counts because of this problem, I'd be pretty miffed.