iTunes Match vs. Play Counts

Well - i think iTunes Match play counts is working for me right now ...

I noticed just now that one of my songs on a new album just get 32 counts, and

it was 18 a few days ago, I just play this song through iTunes Match on my iPhone 5,

so i'm doing a little experiment, I will see tomorrow and the day after how it is syncing ...

I'll let you know

Within 24hours, iTunes Match has updated my library counts, for the song counting 32, it's now 36 ...

Hope it will continue to work ...

LeMarcus does it update your play counts as well as last played data? I seem to remember it updating both before iOS 6. Do you sync your phone to get them to update or does it just do it automatically? I hope when the new iTunes comes out it can be instant like ratings.

VeryQueasy it updates both ! I don't know what I did to make it work, the last thing I tried was turning off iTunes Match on my Mac / iPhone / iPad / Apple TV and turn it on again ...

I hope it will be better with iTunes 11 !

That didn't help me, it was slow to update on iOS5 but on 6 it just doesn't bother with it at all, my computer will update the play counts fine but on my iOS devices it just doesn't update. Some of the time it doesn't even update that it played the track locally on the device let alone on the match database. Having said that at least it does play the tracks & keep the playlists updated with what iTunes on my Mac tells it to.

I echo your sentiments, lets hope for a fix in iTunes 11 & iOS 6.0.1 (or whatever number they give it)

I tried to do a little more investigative work with this as it annoys the crap out of me...I turned iTunes Match off on all my devices, then back on. I removed all music from my iphone, downloaded/played a song from the cloud, synced the phone again and then I used the drop down menu to actually see if the play count updated on the actual phone and just wasn't sending the information to the computer. It turns out, my phone isn't recording the play counts at all.

I now have it set not to sync any music, but have iTunes Match turned on and I still play my music through the cloud but still have no luck with play counts/last played data.

For those of you that the play counts are updating for, do you have your device to sync with any iTunes music data or do you just play through the cloud? This is so frustrating....But I do love this new stream/cache system they have worked up so I can just play whatever song of my 30,000 library instead of picking and choosing what to download on my device.

Great to see clarity from Apple - at least we all now know that the issues are recognised and scheduled for later release attention. However, given long standing nature of such issues this would appear to be a very low priority in the development stack.

Would suggest that we do not hold our breath for updates in this area. Best route to raise priority is to mail Apple direct.

I'd suggest people raise it as an issue via Apple's website:-

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

I have already. Hopefully if enough of us do so, they'll fix it.

I was hoping that IOS 6 would fix this. When I upgraded my iPhone, iTunes on my PC immediately syched correctly (more or less) with iTunes Match. That was a month ago. It hasn't correctly updated my smart playlists (example - recently played music) since that one time.

I think all we can hope for is an upgrade to iOS 6 or iTunes - otherwise there will be a mass exodus when it comes time to renew iTunes Match.

I've already decided that I'm not going to renew. I've waited 11 months for fixes; nothing.

This is my single biggest gripe with iTM. This feature simply doesn't work and is very irritating.

On my iPhone I can literally watch the tracks in my "recently played" playlist get removed as the server overwrites the most recent metadata.

Just received an email from Apple notifying me that my iTunes match subscription will automatically renew in two weeks as I signed up for the service the very day it became available on 11.14.11. Despite the issue I've had with play counts updating, $25 for access to my 25k song library on any of my devices for an entire year is pittance. I have paid a whole lot more for a whole lot less in my lifetime. The past year with iTunes match has been 90% trouble free. Consider that just 18 months ago the idea of having access to 25k songs 'in the cloud' streamed/downloaded to multiple devices was revolutionary and now here we are griping over album art that takes a second or two longer to load or play counts that won't immediately update. iTunes match is the best deal around; I fully endorse it and anticipate that this playcount bug will disappear in the next update or so.

Dear Mr. Cook,

I would first like to thank you and all the folks at Apple for working so hard to deliver such nice devices to customers. I would however like to address a complaint about a service that we as customers pay you for that does not live up to expectation. I understand that you guys are working very hard to fix things like Maps and Siri, which are very high profile. That focus is understandable to an extent, but these are essentially free services included with iOS on the appropriate devices. It is simply not acceptable however that a service your customers actually pay you for does not work as advertised and promised.

iTunes Match is a failure at synchronizing meta data between my devices. The only features that seem to work reliably are downloading and streaming music from the iCloud. While this is a very appreciated success, it is not the only reason we as customers choose to pay for iTunes Match.

The Smart Playlist features are completely broken, as it seems that the meta data these playlists depend on for updating is never synced between devices. I have 2 Apple tvs, 2 iPhones, an iPad and a Macbook Pro, and I can never count on enjoying smart playlists on any of them. My Fresh Hits Play list (100 5 star songs picked by least recent play date) has remained stagnant well for over a month, continually serving up the same songs. The worst part is that as I play them on the iPhone they can be seen to disappear off that playlist and re appear on my recently played play list, as they should, but a short time later the play lists all revert back to the same stagnate state they've been for over a month, presumably because the new fresh data is never pushed to a server while the old stale data just gets repeatedly pulled back down.

If I have to go back to syncing daily just to have working playlists I don't see any point in paying for the service. Will this ever get fixed or should I just not plan on renewing my iTunes Match service?