I almost gave up on iTunes ratings entirely after losing all of them (and play counts) during a hard drive upgrade/iTunes library move. Now I can’t live without them. Read More…
I almost gave up on iTunes ratings entirely after losing all of them (and play counts) during a hard drive upgrade/iTunes library move. Now I can’t live without them.
iTunes 5-star rating system is incredibly useful for music. I use it on my iPod when listening to tracks to separate the wheat from the chaff and then back in iTunes to build smart playlists for “unrated” content, so that I can listen to it and rate it on my iPod. Once populated ratings become incredibly useful in smart playlists, I have created a number bunch called 5-star (genre name) and they are constantly updated as my ratings change.
In fact, I use ratings so much that I wish there were even more. For example, it would be great to have negative star ratings too. I often stumble across tracks that are either poor quality rips, partial downloads (ahem), or just have crappy/incorrect ID3 tags and album art. Leaving these tracks with no rating doesn’t help me track them down and fix them later as I have lots of unrated tracks, so I have been reserving the 1-Star rating for tracks that need to be fixed. It would be great to have five negative ratings too: one negative could mean bad ID3 tags, 2-negative could be album art, 3-negative could mean dropouts or cuts in the track, etc.
In unrelated iTunes news MacSlash believes that they may have cracked the case on Apple’s fake shuffle feature. Ask MacSlash: Is iTunes’ Random Finally Random?
How do you use iTunes’ rating system? Do you find it useful?
