How to change the play count number in iTunes
It’s been awhile since I posted some sort of tech/computer thing on this blog, but when I was using this little tip myself today, I thought I’d share it. I can’t remember how I happened upon this, but I wanted to pass on the info.
NOTE: This is for Windows. I have no idea how you’d do this on a Mac.
One thing I’ve noticed about iTunes is that not everything is easily changeable. For instance the play counts. There’s been times where I’ve accidentally deleted an album with playcounts, and wanted to get back what I had. Or I’ve imported a new version of an album, and I wanted to transfer over my playcounts, but you can’t do that in iTunes itself without resorting to playing the track the number of times you want, and shifting the slider bar to the last two seconds so the playcount gets increased. Those kind of tricks aren’t needed anymore. Just follow these steps.
Open Notepad and put the following text in it:
Dim iTunesApp, currTrack, newPlayCount
Dim prompt, title, defaultValue
Set iTunesApp = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application")
Set currTrack = iTunesApp.CurrentTrack
prompt = "New playcount:"
title = currTrack.Artist & " - " & currTrack.Name
defaultValue = currTrack.PlayedCount
newPlayCount = InputBox (prompt, title, defaultValue)
If IsNumeric(newPlayCount) Then
If newPlayCount >= 0 Then
If Len(newPlayCount) > 0 Then
currTrack.PlayedCount = newPlayCount
End If
End If
End If
Save the file as “SetPlayCount.vbs”, putting it in some easily accessible location. When you double click on it, a box will pop up, asking you what you want the playcount to be.
One caveat, it only works on one song at a time. It will be the “selected” song. Whether it’s playing or not, it will only edit the one track that you have highlighted in iTunes. If iTunes isn’t running, or you don’t have anything selected (like you just started iTunes), it will error as well.
It’s not perfect, but it is useful if you want to change the playcount of an individual track in iTunes.
it works perfect! thanks for solving my problem!
Ive been wondering how i can change the play counts for a long time and ill be using this method often!
Nice iTunes vbs trick! I hate having duplicate songs with varying play counts and this is a good way of combining the play counts and deleting one.
Its great thanks a lot!
not working for me… Error is:
Line: 8
Char: 2
Error: Object required
Code: 800A01A8
Source: Microsoft VBScript runtime error
I’m running Windows 7
Works great, thanks alot, much easier than the other method.
Would it be possible to edit this file to alter the ‘Last Played’ info?
it is very helpful…
Wow! It worked!
It only works for me when the song is actually playing. Otherwise it changes the last song played/give an error message.
Great tool though – had some well played songs which appeared to have their playcount go up 10x, messing up some smart playlists.
Thank you so much ! Great little tool works perfectly !