Quick question on play count transferring back to iTunes

[frankenbeans]

Hi,

I have the 160GB black Classic and iTunes 8.0

I recently learned that the reason my iPod song play counts are not going back to iTunes is that I manually manage my music.

I don't want to lose my play counts (several songs with up to 38-40 plays) and iTunes only has songs with up to about 4-5 plays, because I don't use it all that often to listen to music, just more to manage and catalog and transfer it.

SO THE QUESTION IS:

If I now set the iPod to sync with iTunes rather than manage manually, will it transfer those existing counts on the iPod into iTunes?

OR

will it wipe my counts on the iPod and start from the numbers that are currently in iTunes?

I was going to try syncing to see if it would do the trick and if not, investigate some other more aggressive iTunes hacking to see if I can get the counts into iTunes some other way, but then I realized it may only push the counts in one direction as a starting point and then transfer back counts from this point forward (causing me to lose my counts now)

Please lt me know what you think. Sorry if this has been answered or if my explanation is wordy. I did search the forums and didn't think this was addressed specifically.

THANK YOU!