Probably Stupid Questions about Play Counts..

ghost_user_name

I've had iTunes for a few years but completely reloaded the database after a crash in December. The highest played song only has about 20 total "plays" -- I have over 6000 songs but this still seems strangly low to me.



What does it take for iTunes to consider a song "played?" Is it something like the Last.fm standard of playing 2 minutes/half the song without fast forwarding or rewinding or is it more involved than that? Does playing a song in Party Shuffle affect play counts? Finally, does playing a song on my iPod add to the play count when the iPod is again synced to iTunes.



Sorry if these seem trivial or out of line, but I'm trying to take the recient MacWorld article to heart and clean up my library and it's hard to do that when I can't tell what I listen to.

o4blackwrx

I had the same question, friend of mine answered it. You have to let the entire song to play in order for it to count. iTunes has to switch to the next song without you doing it to count. I listened to this one song 4 times in like 2 hours and I couldn't find it in my play count, but then I remembered I skipped the last 10 seconds (I am extremely impatient) and then looked at last played, it said 4 months ago....huh...well I let it play all the way out and it then switched to that exact time.

endymion

To clarify, you don't have to let the entire song play through. Play count is incremented when the end of the song is reached and it moves on to the next track. So if you want to artificially increment the play count, start a track playing, click in the play progress bar toward the end of the track and then drag it to the very end and let go.



Playing a track directly or via shuffle will increment the play count as long as it's not skipped.



My 1st Gen iPod does not increment the play count, but I think I heard that some of the later generations do. Someone else will need to confirm that.

chucker

I think that got introduced with 3G iPods. My 1G iPod mini does it.

ghost_user_name

Thank you all for clearing that up for me. Hopefully now I will be better able to get my frequiently played tracks in order.

thinkdifferent

iPod Shuffles are unable to contribute to the play count due to the fact that they have no internal clock to gage "last played" which runs hand-in-hand with play count.



I am currently in an iPod transition, waiting for the new nanos, and currently only have a iPod Shuffle and am very dissapointed that it does not increase play count...