(no subject)

[shinytoaster]

O.M.G.

iTunes knows when I've played stuff on my iPod ...

It adds the stuff I've played on the iPod to the Play Count column.

How does it know?

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

This is a long standing feature. If you mount your iPod as an external hardrive, you can root around the library metadata and find details about how often you've played tracks.

When you sync the iPod with iTunes, it updates the library metadata in iTunes to reflect any changes on the iPod. It can do this because an iPod is bound to a given installation of iTunes (presumably as a lame way of stopping people from naughtily sharing music via sneakernet), so iTunes can recognise 'its' iPod when connected, and knows that no other iTunes will have monkeyed around with it.

It does this with things other than the play count as well; if you rate a track on the iPod, the rating will be copied over to iTunes when you sync, similarly with on-the-go playlists.

Since the HD in our desktop died about six years ago, and I lost the iTunes installation, I've effectively only got one copy of all my metadata, that on the iPod. If I sync the iPod with the new installation of iTunes, it'll assume that I want to wipe the iPod and start over again, and I'll lose all of the playcounts and ratings that I've built up over the past few years. Teh suck indeed.