iTunes Match vs. Play Counts

DMaz481 wrote:

But is there a way to correct my play counts before itunes/match trippled them?

"As to how to make your playcounts right, there's no "automatic" way that I know of. You can use scripts to change playcounts, but you have to know which songs to edit with the script."

What I'm saying is that yes, there is a way to edit playcounts with a script where you select songs in the library and increase or decrease the playcount by an amount you specify in the script, or a different script to set the playcount to a certain number. However, you have to know what songs need editing. I'm not aware of some app or script that just looks at your library and figures out what you've played through iTunes Match in order to fix them or allow you to fix them. If someone else knows, maybe they can weigh in.

The only thing I can think of for your request is if you have a backup of your library before you ever first turned iTunes Match and began playing songs.

While trying to fix my playcounts, I hit selected my whole library and did a "reset play counts". I then started using the script to manually adjust playcounts and it would keep reverting back to what the cloud knows. I have since disabled match on my main library and my iPhone and I'm rebuilding my play counts with the script. I had gone about a month after turning on match before I realized how badly it was screwing things up and I had added quite a bit of new music in that time, so I didn't want to just go back to my last known good backup sa I'd have to find each song that was missing and manually add it to my library. I tried the lastfm2iTunes thing but I can't get it to work. So I'm trudging through a spreadsheet I have updating my playcounts in my main library. After I get enough updated, I'm going to erase my whole library from match (using another computer/iTunes) and then turn it back on with my main library and rebuild the whole thing. It looks like things have been fixed well enough that I may try using it again. I will be watching much closer this time though and keeping more backups of my data.

For anyone interested, my manual method of backup is to pick music, hit Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-C, then I open Excel and hit Ctrl-V. I know have a spreadsheet with all the data fields I had displayed when I hit copy. I got in the habit of doing this every week or 2 after seeing iTunes zero play counts on stuff on its own. It seemed to do this on store purchases which I change the matadata for after downloading it.

I'm rather OCD about my play counts, so this whole thing had been quite the ordeal for me, though I'm taking it all in stride...

I've personally tried to use an old library to get back to where I used to be on play counts, I also tried using a old one of my time machine back ups, unfortunately the match system kept resetting them. I've now reset them all back to zero and will start again, not ideal but if everything is now working correctly at least it will be correct going forward.

randy98mtu wrote:

For anyone interested, my manual method of backup is to pick music, hit Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-C, then I open Excel and hit Ctrl-V. I know have a spreadsheet with all the data fields I had displayed when I hit copy. I got in the habit of doing this every week or 2 after seeing iTunes zero play counts on stuff on its own. It seemed to do this on store purchases which I change the matadata for after downloading it.

Great pro tip. Thanks!

Glad my idea could help someone. It's hardly a convenient backup method, but it's the only fool proof way I've found to store that data since it's in a giant database otherwise. If you ever find yourself in my situation, I've been using the script to add play counts to selected songs. Then I highlight that row yellow to know I've added that to where I am today. I did this after I zeroed my playcounts. This way I can keep listening and still continue to add my old playcounts back in as I get to it. I did at one point though have it reset a couple again (or I highlighted them when I shouldn't have.) After finding this and correcting what I could find, I removed all my music from my phone and re-synced it to make sure the metadata on the phone matched what was in my library.

I believe there is still a problem under iOS 7.

I think when you first play a song on an iOS device after that device has been updated via iTunes Match with the latest play count and last played data, then the initial song once fully played is not included in the subsequent sync back to iTunes via iTunes Match. This has happened on both my iPhone and ipad mini and for several different songs. After the initial song has played it does not appear in the last played playlist and it's play count and last played details do not show as being updated in iTunes. Further songs do get updated correctly until the cycle is repeated again following an iTunes Match update. What I can't ascertain at this point is whether there is a time factor that influences this to happen. But at this point it is happening on multiple devices and songs.

HHmm, I will keep an eye out for this with my next sync!

Quazatron wrote:

I believe there is still a problem under iOS 7.

I think when you first play a song on an iOS device after that device has been updated via iTunes Match with the latest play count and last played data, then the initial song once fully played is not included in the subsequent sync back to iTunes via iTunes Match. This has happened on both my iPhone and ipad mini and for several different songs. After the initial song has played it does not appear in the last played playlist and it's play count and last played details do not show as being updated in iTunes. Further songs do get updated correctly until the cycle is repeated again following an iTunes Match update. What I can't ascertain at this point is whether there is a time factor that influences this to happen. But at this point it is happening on multiple devices and songs.

I don't believe this happening to me

Well I'd like to be able to say if this second song lost phenomenom is happening to me, except I can't because iTunes Match didn't sync any playcounts from any ios devices last night despite playing songs last night after 12 hour lapse from having played songs yesterday morning.

My MBP curiously was stuck access iTunes Match all yesterday until I restarted it. Has anyone been experiencing any more outages of the services in the last day or two?

my itunes match has not been working the past few days, and is stuck keeps saying its matching, ect.. then it finishes and then it doesnt show the icloud status so everything just says waiting. It doesnt seem like apple cares about this product anymore, they never do any updates to it, never try to resolve problems with it, it never gets mentioned for almost 2 years.. This thing needs some serious improvments. Its probably the worst experince i had with an apple product is itunes match. i have had so many difficulties with it, i might just cancel.. its easier to back up with an external drive in time machine and manually sync the phone than deal with duplicats, inaccurate play counts, stalls, ect

My iPhone updated fine this morning. Not sure why it didn't either update last night, or show the updates on my other computers. Maybe enough time hadn't lapsed yet. Still nothing from my iPad though. Will check it again tonight.

As for the second song being omitted, I did not experience this. I screen captured my recently played before I initiated the update by playing a song to completion, and what my Windows laptop is showing me now matches the play history of my iPhone. I will keep watching this though.

Actually having previously said everything was working I can now confirm I'm also getting the same issue as someone mentioned with the first song that was played in an album not quite updating correctly, the play count is correctly updating but the time stamp doesn't come with it, so if you have smart playlists based on the time stamp they won't update the with the first song but if you have ones based on playcount they will update. I don't belive this problem was happening last week after IOS 7 was relaeased as I played na album on Friday that worked perfectly, something seems to have changed in-betweeen then

themanlikesasha wrote:

Actually having previously said everything was working I can now confirm I'm also getting the same issue as someone mentioned with the first song that was played in an album not quite updating correctly, the play count is correctly updating but the time stamp doesn't come with it, so if you have smart playlists based on the time stamp they won't update the with the first song but if you have ones based on playcount they will update. I don't belive this problem was happening last week after IOS 7 was relaeased as I played na album on Friday that worked perfectly, something seems to have changed in-betweeen then

I just looked at my update of the iPhone from this morning and checked the "Last Played" and mine has the correct time for all songs. I will keep watching this.

It's very odd that different people experience a bug and others don't. A while back, when most of us here were experiencing the duplicate playcount issue (among others), there were others who never had that problem.

My song ratings are synced almost instantly between my iPhone iOS 7.0.1 and MBP iTunes 11.1 but play count is hit or miss. The song I played yesterday morning updated the play count and date but nothing I've played today has. I guess I'll wait the 12 hours and report back.

Yes I think this is what I am experincing too- I still have two tracks that have no updated last played field since i played them fully about 3 days ago, eventhough there has been many updates of other tracks since then.

The only consistent scenario I can gather at this point is that they were both the first song I had played on my ios device after a period of inactivity. So my theory at this point is that it is caused once itunes match has synced or after a certain length of inactivity, or a mix of the two!

I will keep monitoring and report back and see if the playcount for these tracks are updating even if the last played aren't.