How I rate music with iTunes

Or: Why my ratings system is so screwed up

Jul-10-10, 12:05 pm by Hanford
File under: tech, UI design, Apple, Bad User Interface, Mp3

Any friend who share musical tastes with me (and there aren't many!) knows I have a really weird rating system for my music. One that needs to be explained. Here's what it is:

5 stars: Amazing; 4 stars: Great; 3 stars: Good; 2 stars: Above average; 1 star: Horrible; 0 stars: Average

5 stars: Amazing; 4 stars: Great; 3 stars: Good; 2 stars: Above average; 1 star: Horrible; 0 stars: Average

So it looks pretty standard until you get to 1 star vs 0 stars. They're reversed. When I first tell people that's my system they think I'm insane.

But ... it is Apple who is insane.

Why my ratings system works this way

I do a lot of random/shuffled playback. I don't like spending time managing music, building playlists, and searching my catalog. I just really want to listen to it with as little clicks as possible, and shuffle and smart playlists let me do that.

But iTunes has a problem. when I imported my music library, all my songs were set to 0 stars with no apparent way to change them other than rating song one at a time. One at a time.

Now, on top of this, I have a lot of music that I don't want to hear on regularly, if at all. They're novelty songs that are fun on rare occasions. Or they're themed (read: Xmas) music that I don't want randomly popping up throughout the year. And sometimes they're just songs I hate and never want to hear again*. I'd like to keep these songs from every being picked randomly by a smart playlist.

Ideally, these songs would be rated the lowest in a scale of zero to five, and I could create a smart playlist that says "play songs rated 1 through 5" and I'd get everything but the ones I've tagged with zero.

But, in the real world of iTunes, this means I'm back to square one: stuck with rating every single song which is NOT a zero individually. I'd have to rate hundreds of songs -- one at a time -- just to get a little bit of variety in a random shuffle. It would take forever to get a sizable amount of songs rated that would provide hours of variation.

My solution

I thought this was all very nearsighted of Apple.

All I wanted was to be able to play my library on random and rate the occasional bad song as "never play again", and rate the occasional Good, Great, and Awesome songs as such.

Then I realized I could do this with a smart playlist that looks like this:

Match the following: Rating Is Not One Star

Match the following: Rating Is Not One Star

This smart playlist will play songs rated 0, 2, 3, 4, 5. Everything but one star. if I treat zero stars as average it means that my entire collection is by-default rated as an average tune! I don't need to do a thing to the vast majority of my music. rating a song one star is essentially tagging it as "never, ever be chosen automatically again."

This means that in an average hour of listening to iTunes, I switch to it to rate a song perhaps 4 times an hour. Of course, this number drops as I get more and more of my library rated.

Contrast this with zero stars meaning "never play automatically": it would mean that nearly every song (3 to 4 minutes) I'd have to hop back into iTunes to rate the song as "Average" or above. **

Summary

I was originally going to write up a whole User Experience summary here, bringing up all the design rules Apple missed with this one. But, it should be obvious to you by now: Apple severely cripples the rating experience without allowing batch rating. I'm now stuck with this hack of a system.

At least it works. ***

Footnotes

* Yeah, I could delete them, but there does not seem to be an easy way to do this in iTunes. And it still wouldn't take care of the other cases.

** Not to mention the fact that this wouldn't actually work. If zero stars means "never play again", and by default all my music is rated zero stars, I'd be stuck with using a play-anything playlist that would continue to randomly serve up songs I've played and left at zero. The only solution would be a smart playlist that allows zero-star songs a few trial plays before rejecting them:

itunes optional

But that's less than ideal: you have to listen to bad songs a few times before iTunes stops playing them, and you have to be incredibly deligent at rating your entire collection whenever they play or risk an accidentally unrated song drop off the playcount threshhold. Changing the threshold trades one disadvantage off for the other.

*** For a few versions of iTunes the smart playlist editor UI was broken and it was impossible to create any smart playlist that chose music based around star rating. Luckily I had created my solution before the bug showed up, and it didn't keep my original playlists from operating. It's fixed again in the version I'm using.

**** My "I hold Apple -- as an industry leader -- to a higher standard" rant applies here.

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Edo wrote: Sep-1-10, 5:15 pm

Actually, you can go to your music library, press Ctrl+A (Select All), and the then right click and "Get Info." Here you could just click the rating as 1 Star and every song would end up beginning at 1 star rather than none. Either way I doubt you want to go and do that now after you've rated all your music, haha. iTunes just flipped out today destroyed my libraries, and I managed to accidentally delete the backups so I was forced to reinstall...that's the story of how I arrived here, haha searching for help. Anywho, I have to get back to re-rating my 7000 song library...

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