How do I stop i-tunes from changing the genres for my songs without my consent?

Here is a thread in the Mac area about the zeroed out play counts:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4572312?start=0&tstart=0

So a lot of other users are experiencing that particular aspect of this problem I'm facing, albeit on a different OS.

Unfortunately, my last *complete* backed to an external hard drive is a few months ago. I also sync to the Google Cloud Player automatically, which backs up the files themselves, but it changes it's files to match what itunes does ( :: head thud :: ), other than the fact that Google never deletes what's it's got even if you delete on itunes (Helpful in this case where one fear might be losing actual music files). So I've got two real emergency "break glass" type of solutions available if something really goes bad trying to fix existing issues- with caveats like going back a few months to external drive would mean having to redownload a lot of songs acquiring thereafter (Fortunately most purchases sources offer this, though a few are CDs), and likely manually reripping some things I bought on CD, plus at that point, play counts would become so less useful that I might want to reset them all anyway. And of course my Google Play backup would not include any playcounts to begin with, and would involve downloading 90 gigs of music over the Internet (Could take weeks).

Right now, my external drive is only big enough to include one full backup at a time. So while I've been tempted to do what you suggest and back everything up again, I'd have to delete my existing (stable) backup first in favor of a more up to date backup that I'm less sure of (Who knows what else may be going wrong with the library?). I used to have a larger drive where I did rolling backups (i.e. have like 5-10 iterations of the same thing going back a long time), but it broke down and I couldn't afford to replace it easily, so I put it off. Sometimes financial issues mean I have to make do and can't have perfect solutions to everything (Hence why I have a 5 year old ipod without a working play, pause, or forward button on an old Vista laptop that can't run a lot of things due to a GPU that overheats very quickly and shuts the thing down, a broken keyboard that I.work around with a USB keyboard, and a zillion other things). As you can probably tell, because of a very limited income, there's a bit of a spit and bubblegum approach to barely holding a lot of my electronics together in semi-working condition, though I've never trying to work on ideas to replace some of it.

Anyhow, I agree that following back to the old library to look around, noting some stuff in wordpad, and then reimplmenting the new library and attempting to manually adjust it makes sense. Maybe I can at least get some several week old playcounts for the stuff that's been zeroed out. Is there any way once I know the numbers (if that works) to imput them manually without playing the last few seconds of each song over and over again as it adds the numbers one by one? Maybe a file I can edit in wordpad and imput, say, "48 plays" to each file where applicable?

Thanks. The ideal script for me right now would be one that looks at playcounts from my current library and from my last available automatic backup library file (November 29th). It would preserve the current playcounts, except where they are less than the playcounts in the November 29th copy, in which cases it would revert to the November 29th playcount data for those songs.

Essentially, such a script would preserve all the data including play counts up to the present for unaffected songs, and would replace playcount data for affected files with the November 29th numbers. It would consider anything with a playcount now on December 14 that is lower than it was on November 29th affected, and revert to November 29th for those songs only. Itunes as far as I can tell only cleared playcounts completely or didn't touch them, with no in between, but some of the zeroed out songs have probably been played once or twice subsequently (Hence a script that will look at any songs with lower playcounts now than in November).

"Last played" data appears to be accurate, even for the zeroed out play count songs (They actually read "0" under play count and "Last Played December 3 [or whenever]", so ideally the script would leave that alone. However, if from a technical perspective there is no choice except to toggle the last played to today on songs that have their play counts altered, I can live with that (I'll just toss them in a big playlist afterwards and listen to them over time so that the last played will eventually match when I last heard them for the sake of my smart playlists).

I've been able to handle most of the genre stuff and album stuff manually, so I don't need that in a script, so long as Apple stops messing with it. For the time being, I've cut off access to the itunes store and genius, and revoked permission in the program for Apple to access my library. I'm waiting to upgrade and renable until such a time as Apple seems to have resolved these issues.

Skip data isn't something I use. I hide it on all screens and don't have any playcounts based on it, so I don't necessarily need that in a script either, though I wouldn't mind if it were able to revert skipcount on songs that have lower skip counts in the present to the skip counts they had on the last backup, just in case I do decide to use skipcounts in the future and want accurate data.

Ratings seem unaffected.

So, the main thing I'd be looking for is a script that can revert playcount to the last backup only the songs where I've lost playcount data, and preserve playcount for all the other songs (So that they stay where they are right now instead of falling back to November). Ideally, last played would stay the same since last played seems preserved even on the zeroed out songs.

It'd be awesome if this is something someone can engineer. If it seems too time consuming or not technically feasible, though, let me know, and I'll look into other options.

I should also note that some new music was acquired between the last backup and the present, in case that's something the script needs to know (i.e. that it won't find some matches to compare). Maybe if song not present in backup list, go with current playcount.

I can confirm that my "get info" works on multiple items for me (itunes version 11.0.0.163 (Though that's always worked for me, it's just that it'd change them without telling me, I'd change them back, and it'd change them back again, and so on- followed by zeroed out playcounts and other issues. But "get info" was always working for me.).. Not upgrading further until I feel confident other issues have been fixed and no further files will be altered without consent, or, failing that, until a few point releases go by and I feel like they "must have" changed things back by then if they're ever going to).

Also curious as to whether a script will work because itunes may not consider the same songs the same songs anymore after the unilaterial changes they made to them, which might explain why play counts were wiped to begin with. However, it seems worth a try if someone is willing to write a script! It certain beats the alternatives.

I can think of one manual possibility I could try, but I'm estimating an almost impossible number of hours to do what I am considering by hand, with some data still being left incorrect at the end, and the possibility of corrupting my library files in the process.

A script would be *extremely* helpful.

That'd definitely be very helpful if you can get it done before I move too far past it with my music library (i.e. after too much more time of everything moving past it, a restore to Nov. 29 on those songs may leave the playcounts without much relevance to the other songs- I'm already seeing many come up and get played in my playlists). In any event, it is very generous of you to consider doing it. We can't get back what we had before Apple started playing around, but that would mitigate some of the damage, anyhow. Certainly better than starting over from zero.