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iTunes 11 "Last Played" and playcount not updating?

I am having a playback issue in iTunes 11 under Snow Leopard, OS 10.6.8. "Last Played" and playcount are not being updated after a track finishes playing. The culprit is "Up Next". Any song played while "Up Next" has a playlist queue will not have its "Last Played" or playcount data updated. But if you clear "Up Next" and let the song finish, then that data will be updated.


What an unfortunate bug. Smart lists rule my world, and they heavily count on "Last Played" and playcount to create constantly evolving playlists for me.


Anybody else having this problem with iTunes11? Got a solution?


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Posted on Nov 29, 2012 4:22 PM

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75 replies

Dec 3, 2012 2:27 AM in response to Nick Peck

Can you go into View Options (under View, up top) and select which information will be displayed? I am also not liking that the album art is displayed only in the song info window in iTunes (no longer possible to have the album art show in the lower left corner of the iTunes window). The album art that is show up top is so small as to be a joke and not useful--it's only about 1/4 the size of a postage stamp.

I'm still displeased that I had to turn off cross-fade to get the last played and play count info to update automatically.

Dec 3, 2012 2:36 AM in response to ConstanceMM

Thank you, that is very helpful - theo ther thing whic his missing, as you say, is album art which I had set up previously so it was next to each track, or each group of tracks, played a certain number of times. Really annoying. Why cross fade and play count should be linked at all is rather byond me, but as I said, I have never used cross fade - not even sure what it is!

Dec 3, 2012 2:49 AM in response to Nick Peck

Cross-fade smooths the transitions between songs when playing them, so that instead of each song coming to a full stop with a pause between that song and the next, the first song will fade a bit as the next song begins to play (like a DJ would do). Like you, I have no idea how cross-fade and the play count functions came to be so connected in this bug. Just hoping for a quick fix from Apple!

Dec 3, 2012 4:18 AM in response to Nick Peck

Presumably it's because cross-fade does something with the start and end markers for the song, so the new iTunes doesn't recognise that the song has ended and so doesn't update the play count.


Thanks for the work-around, but it's annoying to have to choose between the two. I always left crossfade on but with the time set to the minimum - it just gave a nicer transition like that.

Dec 3, 2012 6:53 AM in response to The Laughing Imp

Really annoying indeed, but I can relate to the programmers not noticing this bug. I'm a programmer myself and a big rewrite of a piece of software as complicated as iTunes is often accompanied by this kind of small bugs slipping by the test team. Testers usually focus on the new features, so this bug slipped by them while they were probably watching other stuff. All we can do is be patient while we wait on the next bugfix release.

Dec 3, 2012 10:03 AM in response to The Laughing Imp

I am having a simialr problem with OS X 10.8.2. Turning the cross fader off and on did not solve my problem. "Turning off homesharing and devices update play counts" off and then on did solve the problem but I need to do this each and every time I play from the mac.


My music playing is geared to playbacks from smart playlists which are dependent upon the last played feature so this bug is a pain in the proverbial..

Dec 6, 2012 10:37 AM in response to The Laughing Imp

Thanks for all the great feedback on my original post! The disabling crossfade was the option that worked for me. As long as I never engage Up Next, the play counts and last played metadata all update properly. The moment I shift even one song order in Up Next, the metadata is no longer updated. Also, if I re-enabled crossfading while a song was playing, that song's metadata was updated, but soon after the following songs stopped updating. So…


  1. Disable Crossfade in iTunes>Preferences>Playback
  2. Quit iTunes
  3. Reboot for good measure
  4. Relaunch iTunes


Your metadata for playcount and last played should update properly again.


Silly bug, but I can live without crossfade. I can't live with my smartlists that dynamically use playcount and last played not updating properly. I've noticed some other iTunes11 smart list quirks, but those are for another thread.

iTunes 11 "Last Played" and playcount not updating?

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