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iTunes displays the number of "plays" for each track. What exactly does this mean?
For example, playing a little bit of a track does not seem to increment the number. But playing most, but not all, of a track seems to.
Does playing n seconds trigger the increment? n percent of the track? Or something else?
I have a 4GB iPod Mini, if that matters.
The motivation is, I have iTunes set to automatically delete podcasts after they're played, and I don't want to accidentally trigger a deletion.
In the behavior I have seen in the 5+ years of podcast listening. iTunes marks it as played based on a percentage listened. My guess is that would be about 98-99% listened. A 5 minute show would basically be the end. An hour and a half show would be just the last few seconds.
I believe that you just have to listen to the last few seconds of a song. You can skip all of the beginning part, and it will increment the Plays if you listen to the end.
In case Nathan G's answer wasn't super-clear: play count == number of times the file played right to the very end. That means you need to let an audio file play right to completion - either until the next track starts to play, or you are returned back to the song list (if it is the last track in the list).
Nathan G. answer was right but I want to add some other info, if you let iTunes play last second of your song and go to another song it ++ your plays of that song, but if you click other song to play and the remaining time of current song is <5s still iTunes ++ play for that song.
