My new music workflow is pretty simple: put the CD through the Great CD Preservation Project meatgrinder at home, rip again at the office [but only because I can rip faster than I can upload-download], listen at work.
I have two iTunes smart playlists designed for new music: Recently Added [any song imported into iTunes in the last seven days] and Top Songs of the Last Month [four- and five-star songs imported in the last month]. I use a third smart playlist, Unrated Songs, to let me quickly rate new stuff.
What I’m finding, though, is that I’m sometimes … overly enthusiastic with ratings. Stuff that gets a five-star rating really only deserves a four, and stuff that deserves a three might get a four. Now, this over-rating on my part usually occurs when I’m in a good mood and/or really like the artist—especially if I’m new to them!—and want to really like the music. Four- and five-star rating can end up being a habit, and … then I end up with skewed results.
Ideally, this is what I’m going for in terms of what the ratings indicate:
- Five stars: OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS SONG PLAY IT OVER AND OVER!!!
- Four stars: This song is really good. I could listen to it pretty regularly.
- Three stars: This song is good.
- Two stars: Ehhhh … skip.
- One star: Never play this song again!
[Yeah, I end up un-checking one-starred songs so I never hear them again.]
An example: “Dry Lightning” from Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. It’s a nice song, but in my book … not five stars. I rated it as such, though.
I’m wondering what strategies make sense for managing this better. [If you're saying to yourself, "Geof, you're overthinking this! This crap doesn't matter!" ... thanks. Now, go look at something else.] If you’ve got ideas, I’d like to hear them … somehow, re-rating my fours and fives doesn’t seem like a simple process.
You can make the star rating system into a 10 star system instead of a 5 star system (i.e. increase the resolution of the rating system) by taking advantage of half stars (like 3 and 1/2, etc.)
Check it out.
http://andrewescobar.com/archive/2006/02/04/half-star-ratings-in-itunes/
While iTunes does have rudimentary support for half-stars, you can’t use that to do anything useful. If you rate a track as three and a half stars and have a Smart Playlist that lists all tracks with ratings higher than three stars, that three and a half star track won’t show up, only four and five star (and possibly four and a half star) tracks will.
And you can’t create a Smart Playlist using half-star ratings either, so if you just want all of your tracks rated three and a half stars, you’re out of luck, unless you make a manual playlist.
Until Apple fully supports half-star ratings, I wouldn’t bother.
Oh, and the easiest way to use half-star ratings isn’t really through the applescripts linked above. I’d say easiest is to use Star, which not only allows for half-star ratings, but it also has Growl support so you can be alerted when iTunes plays songs that are unrated.
Well, but I don’t find a terrible amount of utility in half-stars. I mean, there’s no functional difference in 3.5 stars out of 5.0 and 7.0 stars out of 10.0. How much resolution do we really need? I think that Apple got it right: five is enough to do the job.
I’ve had the suggestion, which I’ve implemented, that one can define average as two, which gives you two resolution points for good—3 & 4—and one for great. Your resolution points for bad are 1 & unchecked. That’s working out for me, and even now, I’m finding it hard to do much difference between 3 & 4. I really only need five data points, really, which tells me that I could probably use 3 as average and be okay.
I only made the switch two average=2 because I tend not to purchase and keep music that I’m not going to like, so my star distribution is going to be a right-skewed bell curve if average=3. I’m essentially monkeying with the data and playing a mind game with myself to fit my data to a curve, which is probably a bad idea.
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For what it’s worth since this is an old thread, what’s so difficult with re-rating? I agree that I often get over excited about a song and rate it hgher than it deserves in the long run, but it’s easy to rate on the go with the iPod! It’s actually a fun process. To paraphrase an earlier post, why do ratings have to be static. To me, it’s a fun process and enjoy the constant fine-tuning my music organization goes through!
Gerry: Yeah, I regularly end up re-rating as well.
Seeing as everyone is talking about their playlist setup, I’ll give mine up too.
I used to be a Windows Media Player fan, and was in above my head when I couldn’t browse songs by their star rating. After getting used to iTunes’ system I made 5 smart playlists, set to constantly update;
1 Stars
2 Stars
3 Stars
4 Stars
5 Stars
Yes, I named it “1 Stars”- I couldn’t bear for it to look different from the other categories by missing the “s”!
I then made a playlist called “Unrated”, later renaming this to “0 Stars” so that it would be the first playlist on my list.
I then made two playlists; “Albums/Singles” and “Freebies” to differentiate between the rubbish free CD’s you get in the newspapers.
And, just for fun, a “100 all time classics” playlist so that I could have a neat little place with all of my absolute favorite songs.
Anyway, in answer to your article- I used to beg for a ten star rating system, but I figure now that ten stars would take up too much width of my monitor! Besides, I’d only end up with the same problem. After all, what makes a song a 6 and not a 7?