iTunes -- Corrupt play counts

gsfmarkgsfmark
Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
So, my friend asked me what my most played song on itunes was, and to my astonishment the first song when I arranged by play count was "Another Saturday Night" by Cat Stevens, which I imported from a CD, and its play count was -1135876746. How does this happen? I think I imported them to MP3 on my PC then moved them over to my mac (10.4.2. itunes 5.0.1. G4 867 mhz)



There are actually like 20 or 30 songs with screwed up play counts... any ideas?



thanks

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  • Reply 1 of 1
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by gsfmark

    So, my friend asked me what my most played song on itunes was, and to my astonishment the first song when I arranged by play count was "Another Saturday Night" by Cat Stevens, which I imported from a CD, and its play count was -1135876746. How does this happen? I think I imported them to MP3 on my PC then moved them over to my mac (10.4.2. itunes 5.0.1. G4 867 mhz)



    There are actually like 20 or 30 songs with screwed up play counts... any ideas?



    thanks



    There was a problem with corrupt play counts when moving from iTunes 4.8 --> 4.9 and then synching an iPod. Did you do that on your PC (i.e., did you have 4.8 and then upgrade to 4.9?). Do you know how long ago the corruption happened? Do you have any idea how much music you might have imported since it happened?



    Play counts, star ratings (which were also corrupted by the 4.9 update) and some other stuff are stored in the iTunes database file rather than individual track tags, so they can be recovered by reverting to a back-up copy of the database file. If you do this, iTunes will "forget" any songs that you imported since the database backup was made. The files will still be on your hard drive, they just won't appear in iTunes until you locate the files on your HD and drag and drop them to iTunes.



    To revert to a database backup:



    1) Go to ~/music/itunes/. In that folder, there should be a folder named "Previous iTunes Libraries".



    2) Quit iTunes, drag the "iTunes library" file from ~/music/itunes/ to the desktop, and also copy the "Previous iTunes Libraries" folder to your desktop.



    3) Grab the most recent file from the ~/music/itunes/Previous iTunes Libraries/ folder, place it in the ~/music/itunes/ folder and re-name the file "iTunes Library".



    4) Launch iTunes (it'll probably update the library). Hopefully, your playcounts will be restored. If so, you can delete the files from your desktop. If not, you could try some of the other library backups, or just put everything back how it was and make do with re-setting the corrupt play counts (cntrl-click on the tracks in iTunes, there is an option in the contextual menu). Make sure that iTunes is quit whenever moving library files around. You could also try using an iTunes library file from your PC if you've still got it.



    Hope all that made sense, and good luck!
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