How can I prevent foobar from adding play counts to file tags without disabling tag writing?
Unfortunately you can’t. The current version of foobar’s core writes all data to tags on update. The playcount plugin will allow you to delay updates when incrementing play counts, however there is no way to prevent the data from being written if the tag is every manually written. This feature has been requested for future versions of foobar. Fortunately there is no reason to avoid writing file tags to files, and in the event that they are added accidentally, it is trivial to remove them from ones collection using the masstagger.
