I need to remove the album ratings. They are REALLY annoying and ruining my playlists. Please help! Why have album ratings AND song ratings if the album ratings are just going to override the song ratings?
The Album rating does not override the Song ratings.
You can rate both.
If the album/song rating shows hollow/outlined stars, that is based on the ratings you gave the other (Song or Album).
If the rating stars are solid, that is the rating you gave that specific item (Album or song).
I hate this more than life itself. I had all my smart playlists built on ratings based on, 1 for sleep, 2 for upbeat, and 3 for the gym. Not anymore. I can't believe that you can't edit smart ratings to only look at SONG ratings. Dumbest. Feature. Ever.
I'm ticked because I've been building these playlists for 6 months based on star ratings, and that's pretty much ruined now. You can't even sort by song only ratings to make drag/drop easier.
I work in IT and have been using an iPod and iTunes since the iPod G2, and this is the first time I've ever had to come to these forums for help. Thank heavens I found this thread.
This "auto rating" feature is the worst thought out and worst designed UI feature I have ever seen from Apple. Having two different rating systems available, but only one way to set ratings in the device is just asking for trouble.
Until Apple gives us the option to disable the auto ratings, my temporary workaround is to enable both the song rating and album rating columns in grid view, and go through to turn off all album ratings so ONLY songs are rated. At least now my smart playlists are back to working as expected.
Not sure if this was posted already but I FOUND AN SOLUTION!! iTunes 8.2.1.6:
In the album grid view, (between normal list view and cover flow) you can double click the album art in the album grid view, which will bring you to the view from 7.2 (or so) that has the album art to the left and the list to the right!
From this view, you can erase those eerie clear stars by clicking to the left of the album rating underneath the album art.
Here is how the rating systems seem to work together.
If you:
1) Rate one song, it rates that song with a solid star.
2) Rate the album, it rates all songs the same rate using clear stars.
3) Rate one song (solid), the album rating will default to average of all rated songs (clear).
4) Rate the album (clear), you can still rate a song (solid) without changing the album rating. (clear)
5) Rate EVERY track on the album (solid), only then can you change the album rating other than he average of all rated tracks. This will make the album rating a solid star!!!
Me too! BUT, I figured out how to make those precious Smart Playlists work properly again. iTunes 8.x includes the Album Rating criteria for Smart Playlists, and I'm guessing that the Rating criteria is in fact the combined rating.
So I simply added the following condition to my Smart Playlists and they worked again. My example is based on 2 Stars.
Edit your desired Smart Playlist, and press the PLUS + sign to add a new condition. From the criteria list choose ALBUM RATING, IS NOT, and **.
Yippee, hurrah and words to that effect. I have only just been visited by the freaky hollow stars and they attacked one album only. This was driving me nuts and I thought i'd tried everything - hence my 1st visit to the forums. No idea if this will become more widespread, but I am so thrilled that someone figured out how to combat it! Viewing it as a grid and literally wiping them away worked for me. Anyhow, I am ready for them the next time they try to force an album onto my 5 star playlist!
However, I got a little over zealous and tried Chillgreg's method as preparation for future disasters and it wouldn't show a single song in the play list. I am sure I must be doing it wrong. Anyway, it all works at the moment, so I won't panic yet!
I agree, this is a dreadful feature. Lots of thanks for telling me how to remove the ghostly stars, albeit by a manual method.
People use the Ratings for all sorts of reasons, they are a very useful gadget. Apple assumes they are only used to say how much you like a song, and then decides for you how much you like the album. Where is our freedom to decide what the ratings mean and how we want to use them!?
Do Apple read these threads? If so PLEASE either remove this bossy auto-rating feature or at least give us an option in Preferences to switch it off if we don't like it.
I have to say that I agree with Chris in that there really is no problem here and to me it appears to work 100% logically though I've only been useing iTunes since version 6 or 7 and didn't really bother with ratings until late on during version 8. If you only rate tracks and never touch the album ratings, and only use the track rating in a smart playlist, then it should never be a problem - I've not touched the Album Ratings (as yet) so there have been no inferred track ratings ie hollow stars and no problems with my convoluted collection of smart playlists.
As a slight deviation from the main theme, what I will add though is that the half-star rating tweak/fix actually works for Album ratings in part - give an album a 4.5 star rating and it will give any unrated tracks a hollow 4.5 star rating. Sadly it appears that if you give a track (from a totally unrated album/tracks) 3.5 stars then the album gets a rounded-up 4 stars which is a bit of a shame as averages of a bunch of numbers from 1-5 are unlikely to be integers and I feel ought to be represented with a bit more accuracy.
I looked at the description of that script ('+reset the Album Rating to its computed "clear-star" default rating+') and it rather appears that it might simply revert to hollow stars but being a Windows user, and not having access to Doug's scripts, I can't tell for sure. I decided to have a dabble myself so I tried a couple of very simple scripts to reset the album ratings to 0 (turning them into a hollow integral average - like Doug's? perhaps) and to ascertain if a script could set half-stars (which it can). However without getting really clever and keeping a running total for every album, or by sorting by album and rating the album when there's a change in tracks, or simply doing an album at a time, then I can't get it to do anything but whole solid stars.
Oh well, now if there was only a way to enable half-stars on the iPod too...
To simply remove album ratings select the album name from your library. Then go to grid view. You should only see the album art work for that album right click then you should see an option for album rating and then change that to none.
I recommend this AppleScript very highly. I opened it, set the top two switches to 1 and false respectively. Compiled (probably unnecessary, I'm not up to speed on when that is required). Saved it to the scripts folder for iTunes. It fixed every song in my library within about 10 seconds. What a relief. Still, it ***** I have to do this every time I bring new songs into iTunes. I hate this. I wish smartlists ignored album ratings unless you explicitly define them as a factor. Makes song ratings pretty pointless by default.
I've emailed apple support on this. Worst.Feature.Ever. Please add your voices. At min I'd like to see you opt-in to this feature not make it automatic.
Agreed. That would solve our problems. Personally, I find album ratings completely useless, but you are wise in pointing out that it is valuable for some. I wonder if Apple just didn't realize the song ratings were influencing sing rating smarlists. Dumb dumb dumb.
