Ratings, Who Uses Them?

Ratings can be very useful for creating Smart Playlists to select music based on your tastes.

For example, I have a top-rated rock/pop Smart Playlist, which gives me my 4/5 star rated songs, with a genre of "Rock" or "Pop" that I haven't listened to in the past week.

On the flip side, I have another Smart Playlist that gives me my entire Jazz genre, but excludes all one-star tracks (tracks I don't particularly want to hear, but for some reason still want to keep in my collection).

Further, since Smart Playlists update dynamically on the iPod itself, changes to ratings will affect what music appears in a given Smart Playlist right away (well, the next time you select it, anyway).

I do when im bored..

I have every song rated. When I download a song, it automatically gets 3 stars. If I really like it, it gets 4. If I love it, it gets 5. If it's not so good, it gets 2. If it's bad quality and needs to be redownloaded, it gets 0 stars, and if it needs to be re-tagged, it gets 1. These last two are useful because I can make ratings adjustments on my iPod on the go, so if I'm out and about and notice a song is of poor quality, I can change the rating, so when I get back to my computer I have a smart playlist to pull them out and I can fix it.

yea i would only rate my songs when i am sitting listening and doing nothing but i just make a playlist its quicker and easyer

I have plenty of space left over on my iPod, so I don't worry about using ratings as a method of finding songs to delete, but I do use ratings to set my favorite songs apart from the rest. All my favorite songs get a 5 star rating. Then, I have 2 separate playlists for each playlist. For example, I'd have:

Playlist 1
Playlist 1 (*)

The "Playlist 1" is comprised of whatever songs or artists I chose. Then, the "Playlist 1 (*)" only the 5 star songs within the "Playlist 1" playlist.

So, depending on my mood or how much time I have to listen, I might chose to listen to the extended version of that playlist, or only my favorites.

Rating is good, helps with creating smartlists later on, or just a regular playlist as long as i know that i like this or dislike that. Depending on how big your library is the rating of music might be a daunting task. 21,000+ mp3's in my collection so I'm not about to start rating them all, I do when i come across something.

If you use auto sync the rating will transfer back to iTunes.

Ahh, I stand corrected. I always deleted from the iPod view, thanks :)

I rate them when I have nothing better to do so I can make smart playlists that only have the good music in them. I rate songs on the ipod to remind myself which songs are good and which songs are bad for when I am making playlists.

I haven't used ratings so far. Some good ideas in this thread though in regards to using them with smart playlists.

Uh.. this may be a stupid question, but what's the point of rating songs in iTunes? What benefit does it give the user?

5 stars is useful though. I use it like follows:

* This file is either rubbish, or needs fixing/re-tagging.
** Not terribly good song.
*** OK.
**** Good.
***** Excellent - a song I would never get tired of hearing.

Now, if I search on rating in iTunes for all the * tracks, I can delete/fix 'em quickly. And if I create a smart playlist of ***** tracks, I know I'm definitely going to be in for a great listening session! :D

Originally posted by Pistol
5 stars is useful though. I use it like follows:

* This file is either rubbish, or needs fixing/re-tagging.
** Not terribly good song.
*** OK.
**** Good.
***** Excellent - a song I would never get tired of hearing.

Now, if I search on rating in iTunes for all the * tracks, I can delete/fix 'em quickly. And if I create a smart playlist of ***** tracks, I know I'm definitely going to be in for a great listening session! :D

I started off using this exact same approach. However, after a while, I started to notice that the difference between the 2, 3 and 4 star songs were not that great. The difference between a 3 and 4 star song, for example, could be very slim and could depend on my mood that day. Plus, why would I ever create a playlist for 3 star songs -- ie., would I ever be "in the mood" to listen to mediocre music?

So, now I don't even bother with 2-4 stars. I just use 1 and 5. The 1 star songs are either songs that need to be fixed somehow or that I want to delete entirely, and the 5 star songs are my favorites. Then, I make playlists that pull together the 5 star songs with other various criteria.

i found this useful tip at smartplaylists.com which i do now for my songs.

1) i set all my songs to 3 stars
2) when i listen to a song that i feel should have a higher/lower rating on it... i change the rating
3) then i make a playlist for 1/2/3/4/5 star songs... and listen to them as i like.

I don't have my ipod yet so have a few questions:

1. How easy is it to rate the song in the ipod? one touch, go through menus.. ect? I like the rating ideas depending on how much work it is using the ipod. Rating using itune is just too much trouble.

2. For c0mplex who rate all the songs 3 stars to start with. You mean you do it with itune right?

3. Once you rate it in your ipod, you have to go back to itune to sort them right? You can't just use ipod to play all the 5-star songs without going through itune first, can you?

I, like many, use the rating system to manage my tunes on the iPod.

To get my baseline of music, I dumped EVERY SINGLE CD I have onto the iPod, without picking which songs I liked and did not like - everything went in. That was just the most efficient way to do it. So now the iPod is full of a bunch of songs that I don't care for.

Every new song gets a rating of 0. I think I have a smart playlist set up to play only unrated songs (more on this in a bit).

When I listen to a song that is unrated, or even if its rated it gets rated by the following scale:
1 = dump it - to be deleted from iTunes after next sync
2 = problem with file - get a clean copy and reset that one to zero to rerate. This allows skips in cd rips or crappy downloads to be corrected.

3 = like it - the stuff I listen to occasionally
4 = love it - really good stuff
5 = must keep at all costs

This way, after a sync (when the ratings I generated on the iPod while listening, say while excercising, are downloaded into iTunes), I can pull a list of all the ones rated with one star, and easily delete them. I can pull the list of 2 stars and go and get clean copies of them to replace the busted copies I have.

now on to my problem, ie. I think I have a smartlist...

I said I thought I had a smart list. For some reason, iTunes (windows vers 1.8 on XP as well as its predecessor verson ) have this probelm where in the smartlist, I can select MyRating and select IS (or some other comparator) but I cannot specify ANYTHING in the value field - it stays empty and I cannot put anything into it?

I would have thought I'd get a dropdown of 0->5 stars, but nope.
Anyone have an idea? I had my default iTunes, and upgraded to the latest version just now, STILL cannot put in a star value into the 'value' field to compare with 'MyRating' in the smartlist.

Is this a known issue ? Anyone know?

I'd ask Apple, but since they are such jack-arses and refuse to take any sort of feedback from customers on issues with their product or software, unless the customer uses a service call to give them feedback, there is no way to get the data back to Apple. (Yes, the guy in the iPod store in Bellevue, Washington said, sorry we cannot take feedback, check out the internet forums folks have set up for help = Apple if you monitor this, you probably lost a customer here as this will probably be my first and my last Apple product for the arrogance of the support).

i use ratings for smart playlists and also i have a smart playlist for songs that i havnt rated yet and need to rate!

I think I would probably end up rating most of my music with 5 stars, defeating the purpose.