play count going blank

I've noticed that my play counts will reset to 0 after I've been to the itune store. There will be a random number of songs that I've bought from them, some times an entire album will be reset to 0. It is very annoying because I use my play counts for the order I listen to my music.

Yes, this is very annoying. I use play counts and play dates to pick out songs I haven't listened to much, or recently. I'd very much like to see this bug fixed.

I was wondering if anyone has found any other solutions to this problem. My crossfade has never been on and I double checked this when I saw other feedback.

I am OBSESSED with my playcounts and am mortified that some of them have randomly reset (though the date of recent play is still correct). How can something have a play count of "0" when it was just played last week?

I hope Apple fixes this soon and that the fix will retroactively correct the already cleared counts. I rely heavily on Smart Playlists which are contingent on play counts!

Throwing my hat in the ring on this one as well. I've essentially stopped playing music since I upgraded to iTunes 11 as it is a miserable experience for me. I've had ID3 tags randomly reset. The entire crossfade debacle where nothing was recording a count if crossfade was turned on (which mine was) and NOW, while trying to fix tags and other things, I noticed that entire playcounts have been randomly deleted. I work in the software industry so I understand there are going to be bugs with releases but this is just plain egregious contempt for your user base.

I'd find another audio app if I didn't have an entire Apple ecosystem.

Turn off the Cloud options. That is what's causing it.

First, View > Hide Purchases in the Cloud.

Then Preferences > Store and un-check the option to Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases.

The Cloud options have caused me nothing but grief, and they are turned on by default in iTunes 11. I suffered almost daily play count resets of random albums (as many as 74 albums affected one day) until I turned off those options. It hasn't happened since.

Let see if that works. I never had the cross fade on to have to deal with that. So now I've turned off the Cloud setting. Lets see if that stops the deleting of my play counts. It hasn't been too bad lately. Just a song here or there. the worse was when it delted three albums and I don't know how many idividual song play counts in one day!

I hope this works.

I've already had those turned off so I'm sure the play counts have been deleted for a while but due to my limited interaction with iTunes since upgrading to 11 I'm just finally noticing them now. It's still good advice so thank you for posting.

Thanks GregMac1213, that seems to have fixed it for me.

Hi all. I've had the same problem with my play counts randomly resetting, which is upsetting, as I was sort of keeping track of how many times I'd listened to certain songs over the past year. My crossfade has never been on, so that's not the issue.

When I go to the view menu, I don't see "hide purchases in the cloud" listed as an option. Maybe I'm being a dunderhead and not understanding your instructions, but all my view menu has is:

View options

column browser

show up next

show status bar

hide sidebar

show duplicate items

show visualizer

visualizer

full screen (grayed out)

show mini player

show equalizer

hide menu bar

switch to mini player

Thanks for any clarification!

First, make sure you are in the "Songs" list view. Then, click on View Menu/View Options and make sure the iCloud Download and iCloud Status are UNchecked. Then go into Preferences/Store and make sure Show iTunes in the Cloud Purchases is UNchecked.

Hope that helps.

This has been happening to me, too, and I think I have figured out at least part of the problem: iTunes seems to want to assign some of my albums to different genres than the ones I had assigned them to. This may not be the whole problem, but in my case it's certainly part of it. Every time I open iTunes and find that there is a new list of "unplayed" music, I also am noticing that the genres on those songs have been changed.

In order to allow me to make smart playlists by genre, I use the fewest genres possible. For example, I put nearly everything I own that's in the Spanish language in the "Latin" genre -- whether it's David Bisbal or Olga Tanon or Vicente Fernandez. And right now music by all three of these artists has suddenly become "unplayed" because the genres have been changed by iTunes. David Bisbal is now Pop, Olga Tanon is Salsa y Tropical, and Vicente Fernandez is Regional Mexicano. Similarly, one of my Samira Said albums has suddenly become "unplayed" and the genre has changed from Middle East/Arabic to World.

I don't understand why Apple has suddenly decided it needs to tell me how to organize my music, but I need them to STOP NOW!!! What is especially strange is that, as soon as I select one of these re-genre-sized songs and select "Get Info" it shows up as being in the genre I originally assigned it to! Messing with the genres is causing music not only to lose its play counts, but it's also causing it to drop out of my genre-based playlists, which is doubly annoying.

It's still the Cloud features that are doing it. It's not that the genres getting reset are causing the music to lose play counts. Rather, both are symptoms of the same thing: wonky Cloud features. I still suggest turning that off completely until Apple can sort it out.

Personally, I never plan on using iTunes Match or the Cloud for music in any way. So I will keep that option disabled indefinitely.

Thanks! Will see if this helps, but sadly, looks like the play counts that have been randomly reset are reset forever. Doesn't look like apple considers this to be a terribly important issue.

Yes, which is surprising. In software engineering, bugs that cause "data loss" are usually considered very serious. Maybe the vast majority of iTunes users never use their play-count or last-played data. Perhaps those of us here on this thread are the vocal minority who actually care about play-count and last-played.

I have been having the same problem for a few weeks now and finally got fed up enough to try and do something about it. It won't let me contact actual Apple support though because it wants a serial number and won't give me a phone number without it. I have just implemented the cloud turn off suggestions and am hoping that will fix it, but in my opinion, iTunes 11 is an abbysmal failure. It won't even fit on my screen right, I either loose the bottom inch or so, or I lose 1/4 inch from each side depending on whether it is maximized or not, ridiculous.