Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods.

March 23, 2007 12:26 PM

Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods.

Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods.

I have a 3G ipod and a 1G nano which I sync about once a week with itunes 7.0 on my Macbook.

When I play songs on itunes, the play count for that song increases by one and it appears in the Recently Played playlist (and is submitted to LastFM, by the way).

When I connect my ipod and do a complete sync, play counts are not updated and songs played do not seem to appear in the Recently Played playlist (and are not submitted to LastFM).

I have both ipods to sync specific playlists, and I have not checked the box that says "Manually Manage Music" on the ipod summary screen (I heard that can cause sync problems).

I thought it might be a chronology problem – that if I played my last ipod track at 2 PM and my last itunes track at 3 PM, that when I did a sync it wasn't tracking anything from before my last played itunes track. (Did I explain that clearly?) But that isn't it. I've been using itunes for years and I've never seen it behave that way before,
and I just did a test, using my ipod for 24 hours without playing any tracks on itunes. I did a sync, and none of them are in Recently Played, and the play counts have not changed.

What's going on? How can I get itunes to keep track of the songs I play on my ipod? (Can't get them submitted to LastFM either, but that's a secondary issue).

posted by rglass to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Just to double-check, is the clock on your iPod set to the same time as your desktop? I used to have this problem when my iPod decided to reset its clock.
posted by mikeyk at 12:58 PM on March 23, 2007

Apologies in advance for the side question, but rglass doesn't have her email address in her profile. What are you using to send information to last.fm on your iPod played songs? I was using audiopod but it stopped working, and I can't get iSproggler to work at all.
posted by matildaben at 1:14 PM on March 23, 2007

Has the battery for your ipod died? My ipod won't update track played info if the battery has died.

Also - ipod discussion forums at apple.com might have some useful info for you.
posted by hazyspring at 1:14 PM on March 23, 2007

This happened to me recently with my nano. I did the reset to factory settings thing through iTunes, reloaded it, and it's been fine since. Basically, try rebooting your iPods. Though it's weird that it happens on both.
posted by bibbit at 1:27 PM on March 23, 2007

I doubt it's the iPod(s), since rglass mentioned having two and neither work. I'd try re-installing iTunes and see if that does it.

matildaben, rglass has a Mac. Given this, I'd guess iScrobbler, which uses the Recently Played playlist to submit songs.
posted by smorange at 1:28 PM on March 23, 2007

This is rglass' boyfriend - she posted the question on my behalf.

Mikeyk was absolutely right - the date on my 3G ipod had been reset to the year 2000 somehow (that pesky Y2K bug!). I corrected it and updates are working fine.

The Nano time was off by half an hour. I did a couple tests and it seems to be working fine now. Will have to keep playing with it. (I use the other ipod much more often.)

I use iscrobbler for LastFM submissions but didn't realize that it had been updated in the last few months. The version I had does not submit ipod tracks. I updated to the latest stable version, and it seems to be sending info on ipod tracks (as long as no tracks have been played on itunes since then.) Thankfully, the new version automatically checks for updates.

Thanks all!
posted by kdern at 1:51 PM on March 23, 2007

I stand corrected. Glad to hear it's working now!
posted by smorange at 1:54 PM on March 23, 2007