Itunes playcount too high

Hi there. I just downloaded the latest Itunes (for Windows) and updated my Ipod Touch (gen 5) to iOS 8, and now every time I play a song (on my Ipod), the play count won't get updated properly. Listening a song once increases the playcount randomly. Sometimes it increases with 1, but in many cases, it increases with 2, 3 or 5 or even up to 20. I never had this issue before. The playcount was always spot on. Now, it is total trash. Why is this and how can I fix this?

Note: only happens on my Ipod. If I play a song on Itunes itself (on my computer), the playcount increases properly.

Thanks in advance!

Posted on Sep 21, 2014 6:57 AM

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157 replies

Oct 29, 2014 6:44 PM in response to randy98mtu

I spoke to a "Senior Advisor" tonight. He read through this thread and was researching to see if this issue was currently being addressed. He could not find any evidence that it was. So he asked me to do some tests and sent some screen captures to him. Below is the summary I sent to them:


“King” started at 6 and phone had been restored last night. Properly counted 1 play to 7.

Played again, count went to 9 instead of 8.

Played again, count went to 12 (should be 9 now)

Played again, count went to 16 (should be 10 now)

Rebooted phone, played again. Count went to 21 (should be 11). At this time, 3 other songs played tonight also went up another 1 despite not having been played.

Removed all music from phone, sync’d. Loaded music back onto phone. Played “King” again, count went to 27 (should be 12 now). The 3 other songs played incremented again despite not being played.


So it seems that the theory that the play register is not getting cleared after a sync is correct.

Oct 31, 2014 11:11 AM in response to Angeltearx

This is annoying. I feel that if we pay a premium for Apple products then we should be able to expect that any software defect, no matter how trivial should be dealt with promptly. I don't however think that this defect is trivial. As the previous postings have indicated many people rely on play counts to update their music libraries and playlists and the ITunes Player is a significant part of the Apple product range. I have reported this to Apple and they say that their engineers are looking into this but the last update has failed to address the matter. I begin to think that Apple, just like all the other big companies don't really care about what their customers think once they have handed over their money for their (expensive) products. I hope that once they have begun to haemorrhage customers they will get their act together. Sorry Apple but if you want us to pay the Apple premium, we demand a premium product and a premium response when things go wrong.

Oct 31, 2014 11:37 AM in response to IBloopers

I totally agree. I have close to $2000 sitting here with a 128 gb iPhone 6 Plus and a 128 gb iPad Mini Retina and I'm using my 32 gb iPad Mini 1 with a cracked LCD because it's still on iOS 7 and actually works correctly. And on top of that I'm fighting to get my iPhone to pull down data all day because it can't reliably switch between LTE and 4G. Think I'm going to see if I can squeeze in a trip to the Apple store this weekend to get my phone looked at. But yes, this problem at this point will greatly impact future purchasing decisions.

Nov 2, 2014 7:50 PM in response to Angeltearx

I've tested it out more now that I feel comfortable keeping track of what is messing up using the Last.fm Scrobbler App on Windows and a script for reducing plays and what I've found is if you simply remove the songs you just listened to (not your entire library) from the iPhone and then sync them back onto the iPhone it should only add one play if you only play the tracks once before syncing again. The one exception I've found to this is my songs I've purchased from iTunes. Those have messed up plays from before and I can't get those to start only adding one play regardless if I remove them and re-add them by re-syncing. Kind of ironic that the best way to avoid this glitch for future songs is not buying from the iTunes music store.

Nov 4, 2014 10:27 PM in response to Yawenaj

Hey Yawenaj (Star Trek Voyager fan, eh?), sorry I didn't reply sooner! I had talked about what I use a few pages ago but this discussion has kinda moved on, so I'll repost the link here:


http://kalebgrace.com/code/itunes/scripts/play_count_-_change_selected.vbs


If you save that file (you can also just highlight the text and enter it into Notepad and save as a .vbs file) you can run that script on Windows (at least it works for me on Windows 7) after you highlight tracks to change in iTunes and adjust them up or down whatever amount of plays. You can also just enter a # without a + or - in front of it and it will simply change those tracks to exactly that amount of plays. It works very nicely!


And if you're not already doing so, I'd STRONGLY encourage you and anyone else who wants to be able to keep track of what's changing to consider installing the Last.fm Scrobbler because that does a great job telling you what tracks have changed play counts...just make sure you adjust the settings to ask you before scrobbling so that you can see what it has caught.


Good luck!

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Itunes playcount too high

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