File under: stars,ratings,itunes,ilife,apple
I've been thinking a lot about star ratings lately. Both iTunes and iPhoto allow users to rate items from 1 to 5 stars. At first, that seems like a simple metaphor, but after years of use, I'm still learning how best to leverage that scale.
For iTunes, I originally started ratings songs either 4 star or 5 star. After rating a thousand or so songs, that granularity became too narrow. Out of 17k songs, I had well over 1300 songs rated with 4 or 5 star. I had started rating songs 3 stars but didn't really have any smart lists taking advantage of a wider dynamic.
I decided that I needed to reduce the inflation in my current ratings, to move the bulk of my ratings into the middle of the bell curve, and reserve the 5 star for truly outstanding media. In order to do that, I devised a method to drop the ratings of all my songs across my entire library. First, I created a set of smart lists: 1 Star, 2 Star, 3 Star, 4 Star, and 5 Star. Next I ran the following AppleScript against each of those lists, starting with 1 Star.
tell application "iTunes"
set theTracks to a reference to tracks in playlist "1 Star"
set theCount to count of theTracks
repeat with aTrack in theTracks
set currentRating to rating of aTrack
set rating of aTrack to (currentRating - 20)
end repeat
end tell
Notes on this script:
- The ratings are stored as a value from 1 to 100, thus subtracting 20 removes a star.
- For some reason, this script won't run all the way thru without errors, and so I had to re-run it again and again until the current list was completed downgraded. But, that's OK, since the order of operations meant that I never had to worry about my rating metadata losing its overall integrity.
How do you use the ratings in iTunes to manage your music?
Recent Comments