Q: iTunes 11 "Last Played" and playcount not updating?

So do I (miss seeing my playcounts in album view!) - and all the other information - date added, date last played etc. iTunes seems now to be a homoganised product geared more to people who like to create "chill lists" etc. rather than artists and their albums. Each to their own, I say - which is what used to be offered.

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.

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!

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!

Thanks for the explanation. Not a feature for me - Christmas party, perhaps!!!

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.

maybe someone in the genius bar can fix this... has anyone tried that

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.

A very good point.

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..

Happening in iTunes 11 for Windows (XP Pro) and OSX 10.6.8. Really annoying. There's nothing I like about iTunes 11's UI changes, but it seems it wasn't tested well enough either.

Go to the View tab, hit View Options, and then start clicking the boxes you want.

i found that going into "edit", "preferences" and then "sharing" and checking the box marked "home sharing computers and devices update play counts" worked for me!

I have an odd one - playcount now working EXCEPT two tracks which are intros of under 10 seconds each - which insist on being shown as unplayed! All other tracks seem to be updating playcount just fine. I have checked, unchecked cross fade. Closed and restarted iTunes.

Any other suggestions?

Many thanks