iTunes Match vs. Play Counts

I dunno for me once i upgraded to iOS 7 and the latest iTunes everything is workign perfectly. My last played dates and play counts get updated within 24 hours.

Unfortunately, the answer you get from Apple Tech Support depends on which representative you get.

Last year I sent an email directly to Tim Cook complaining about this and other iTunes Match problems. My case was escalated to the iTunes Match engineers. I went through about 20 emails back and forth with them.

The first question they asked was "Are you noticing it takes longer than 24 hours for the play counts and/or last played data to sync?". So obviously they do expect it to work, and apparently within 24 hours.

They changed something on February 14, 2013: "I also wanted to let you know that the issue you were having with play count and last play count have been resolved. If you are still seeing an issue after a 24 hour time window after a song has been played/updated please let me know."

That did fix the data for me. I don’t know if it still works, because I stopped using iTunes Match as a player after that. Too much hassle. It’s much easier to just fill up my old "iPod With Video" (60 GB!) and carry that around.

Same here

Can anyone confirm this is fixed? In my experience, the playcounts sync within about 24 hours, but after a couple of weeks they revert back.

FWIW I've disabled iTunes Match on my iPhone because I like to use smart playlists based on playcounts. Also the way iTunes sync removes non-synced tracks saves me from having to to the General > Usage > Music > Delete thing everytime I need to free up some space.

Still keeping my subscription going though as iTunes Match on the desktop works pretty well.

It's been working correctly for me for months. See the posts from the last few months since iOS 7.

April 2014 - running Current version of iTunes & iOS on iPhone.

Even after turning off iTunes Match & Home Sharing & Logging out / in to iTunes store & disabling Wireless Sync, restarting iPhone, Reinstalling iTunes, Switching from Automatic to Manually Update Music back to Automatic (it had been set to Automatic) my play counts / last played date do not update from iPhone to iTunes thus all my Last Played smart playlists (which are the foundation of how I update the iPhone) are useless.

GRRRRRRRR..... Something is rotten in the Apple..

That stinks. Are you making sure to play music from the phone about 12 hours after the last time you started playing music? The updates aren't instaneous (although they seem to be happening more often for me now). The last time we dissected this here, it looked like it was taking playing a song to completion 12 hours after the start of the last listening session, and then all songs played in that 12 hour window would be updated.

My playcounts appeared to be syncing fine for a few weeks and then started resetting again. I think the local database for the iOS music app gets corrupted or something. Probably it just can't handle a large library (I'm close to the 25,000 limit) and a smart playlist that has to check the entire library for songs that have been played less than twice.

Anyway, as of last weekend I've turned off iTunes Match as apart from the playcount problem, it made my iPhone 4S horribly slow, frequently crashed the Music.app and drained the battery. Will take another look in a few months, though I may well step over to Spotify now that they are rolling out the "Your Music" collection feature.

Hmm. I hope that doesn't happen to me. I'm at about 18,000 songs and it still works properly for me now. I'm going to have to check out this Spotify feature.

Does this "Your Music"-feature in Spotify allow us to:

• Create dynamic play lists like: all music which I have played the most, limited by 1000
• All music which I have played last year a lot
• etc.

This is the number one reason why I'm still stuck at iTunes.

It stopped updating iTunes Library in January 2014, when Match was turned on. No play counts / last played date on on my iPhone since then is reflected in my MacBook's iTunes library play counts.

Next, I will try backing up and deleting my plist files, exporting my iTunes library xml to a new test user, and trying iTunes Sync (?). This will at least tell me if the problem is associated with my own iTunes user data (??).

Sigh. I've had the play counts update about every 12/24 hours since iOS 7. But I'm not sure what happen with 7.1. Now only one track gets it's play count updated if I play many.

Frustrating. Definitely not going to renew my subscription when it expires.

I just wanted to post a quick word of thanks to everyone who has contributed to this gargantuan thread but especially to crankerchick for the amazingly in-depth analysis. My experiences are definitely a subset of your own, unlike other anecdotes posted in these forums and elsewhere on the internet, where it's almost a dice roll as to whether I've seen any given behaviour before.

This leaves me with no doubt that you have nailed the root cause, if not the reason, of the iTunes Match woes which is this inexplicable 12-24 hour+ delay before local changes on some iOS devices are reflected to the cloud. How Apple, or indeed the many of their customers who seem resigned to this behaviour, can find this acceptable in 2014 is beyond me. Certainly Apple have a lot of users, but not nearly as many as Google whose cloud services work flawlessly. If this is a design decision to mitigate server load or bandwidth requirements then Apple are doing something seriously wrong with their cloud infrastructure, and if it's simply the result of a long-standing bug or bugs then I'm even more concerned because Match users have been complaining since day one.

Thanks again for the great thread. Of all the various bits of internet dedicated to getting to the bottom of this issue, this is by far the most useful I've found.

That's exactly what's happening to mine now. Back when I first got itunes match it wouldn't sync any playcounts from my phone, then it mysteriously started working a few weeks after a itunes update.

Now, again after an itunes update, it's not working. It will update one song, usually the very last played, but none of the others I played just before it.

Why can't Apple put resources towards fixing this issue?

Mine used to update play counts after a week or two but now it's hit or miss. I know of several missed play counts in the past week that are some where in cyberspace. Maybe they'll show up someday.