Shuffle and missing playcounts

Jim Dalrymple, big cheese over at MacCentral, was perplexed by his ‘pod—specifically his iPod shuffle and its seeming inability to remember playcounts. He’d take it on a trip, run through its music library a few times, plug it into his Mac, and the play counts in his iTunes library were dutifully updated to reflect the times he’d played the tunes on his shuffle. He’d do what he believed to be the exact same thing—rock out to his shuffle on a subsequent business trip—and the next time he plugged in the shuffle, nothing. The playcounts remained where they were.

Knowing that I’m concerned with all things iPod, he asked me what was up.

“No clue,” I replied.

Contumacious Canadian that he is, Jim wouldn’t let it go and he tried one thing and then another to see what could make his shuffle and its playcounts so uncooperative. Finally he tumbled to the answer, which is:

If you create a playlist, upload it to your shuffle, play the shuffle, and then sync the shuffle to this same playlist without altering it, the playcount updates as it should. However, if you create a playlist, upload it to the shuffle, alter the playlist in some way (and this can be as minor an alteration as changing track order), and then sync the iPod with iTunes, the playcount won’t change.

So now you know. Please use Jim’s knowledge wisely and for the betterment of humanity.