[MartiNZ]

Since updating to iTunes 5, my 6GB iPod mini has been behaving differently. Every time I connect it, it comes up with a list of songs that it wants to 'update', and I have realised that these are the songs that have been played since it was last connected.

Why does playing songs in iTunes suddenly require my iPod to copy them again? I was suspecting it was something that iTunes 5 changed when I thought it was just a one-off for each file, but it isn't. Cheers.

[lavar78]

Didn't it always do that? Since the play count changed, the order and/or contents of some of your playlists may have also changed.

[MartiNZ]

I don't think I've ever had it behave like this before. For one I've only got one playlist that goes to the iPod, and I didn't think that it stored play count. Mind you if it is attached to the files I guess it makes sense ... the file has changed.

[jdc45]

Every time I play songs, it updates my iPod 4g Mini 2nd Gen. iTunes 5 is good but this glich needs to be addressed ASAP. If anyone has figured out how to fix it please let me know.

[icruise]

If you have a playlist set to be automatically updated, it will update every time a song is played, or if you change anything about the song (title, genre, art, etc) on iTunes. I don't know why it didn't do this for you before, but that is in fact the normal behavior. Is it possible that you had manual updating enabled before the upgrade or something?

Edit: I'm starting to second-guess myself now. Does it really update songs that have only been played? I'll have to experiment and get back to you.

[Krypton]

I have noticed it now copies across songs that have been played in Party Shuffle - it didn't do this before.

I'm pretty sure it only needed to transfer a song if some of the ID3 tag was changed since the last sync - play counts are stored in the Library XML file I think.

[dampeoples]

I've noticed that it picks a few songs and updates them. I think that they were played that day, but I listen to an average of 100 a day on the iPod, and it doesn't update that many. Oh well, it seem slike they are still all there...

[RogerR]

I am getting the exact same behavior with iTunes 5 as that described by the original poster. When I sync my 30 gig iPod photo with my iMac, it updates every song that I have played since the last time I synced. These songs are not associated with any playlists, nor was anything else changed about the songs. They were simply played through iTunes on the computer. It did not do this before iTunes 5 and no changes have been made to my iTunes preferences that would cause it to behave differently than it did before.
Strange behavior indeed.

[icruise]

Yes, and after thinking about this a bit more, I don't think this used to happen. The play count, etc are not stored in the song files, but rather in the iTunes library (or at least that's the way it used to be). Is it possible that it's now modifying the songs themselves somehow?

[RogerR]

I updated to iTunes 5.0.1, hoping that this problem would be fixed, but there was no change. I then decided to delete the Recently Played smart playlist that is a default playlist within iTunes, and this appears to have solved the problem. However, I had only played about six or seven songs since the prior sync, so it is possible that the songs updated so quickly that they just didn't show during the iPod updating.

[yticolev]

Is it possible it is updating your computer's last played metadata? It should do this, but maybe it did not tell you while it was doing before.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

I'm getting the same freakin' probem. Every time I plug in my iPod it wants to update 300 or 400 songs that are already on the iPod! It's driving me insane.



greg

[hickey]

same problem, I thought it might have just been updating the play count, but i couldnt find that on the pod itself. hopefully this will be adressed soon.