For some weird reason a whole load of my play counts have gone wild since using ITunes Match and ICloud. Some ave bizarrely gone up by about 500 plays!

I’m sure I read somewhere that play counts could be edited. Could anyone tell me a How To – or is there an app???

Are you windows or Mac OS user? There are applescripts to do this available online for Mac users, I think you need to edit the xml library file with a text editor to make it happen in windows.
Open the library file with the text editor (iTunes should be closed for this) and look for your song in the list, adjust the number between the playcount tags alongside it, save and you are done.

It’s in Windows….I did actually try editing in notepad as you suggested but it reverted back to a high count. I use iTunes Match and also connected an iPod and synced it …. So I wondered if that triggered it back to higher count?

Does your iPod plays get added to the iTunes play count? If so, have you left the iPod playing for hours to rack up a high count on that? When you plug it in, the count is added and ncreases…