Q: Itunes playcount too high

So I may have spoken too soon lol... they got me again! I skipped over two songs but their counts went up by one. The song I played went up by two.

*sigh* so many regrets...

It's definitely only certain songs that are affected with me. Ellie Goulding's Anything Could Happen really spikes. I don't even like it that much. I've started to now make a list of the songs that are causing me problems and will re-add them when it's sorted

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.

That's odd because when I removed the music and readded it, that started things over again.

And I'm also wondering why he could find no evidence that the issue was being addressed. The senior advisor I talked to has kept in touch with me every few days to let me know it's still being worked on.

Perhaps we should share our case numbers with each other to pass them the the advisors. 

<Personal Information Edited by Host>

Just remembered my cracked iPad mini 1 is still on iOS 7. Guess that is my new iPod. Bummer it's only 32 gig and im carrying around 2 128 gig iPods that I can't use.

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.

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.

I have ipad. iphone, apple TV and Imac. if apple doesn't sort this I will sell everything

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.

A pretty high percentage of my music comes from the iTunes store, which explains why removing and putting songs back didn't work.

What script are you using to amend the playcounts and have you got a link please?

I believe it's this one. http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=addorsubtractplaycount

Thanks, Randy. Don't suppose there's a Windows-supporting script that does the same?

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!