iTunes changing star ratings

I noticed this in Novmber of 2019, and at first I thought I had just accidentally changed some ratings manually but as time went on it was spreading. I knew it had to be in something that got changed on an upgrade which was doing it. It was wiping mostly 4 star and 5 star ratings to zero but it was also changing zeroes to 5 stars and changing 5 star to 3 star, 3 star to 2 star, and so on. When I learned about the gray star ratings, I set all album ratings to zero through iTunes and then saw that some of them had turned to blue star ratings which were also wrong. I reset my whole library to zero ratings and started manually putting the ratings back in, but over time I noticed they were being changed again. So I got Apple Support involved and we are still working on a sure solution, but this is what we have discovered so far:

1. When you export a playlist, create a new library file, and import that playlist, sometimes it wipes and and changes ratings.
2. Sometimes when I plug in my iPod, that will trigger a big ratings change in the library, even for stuff I had not played lately. However, that doesn't happen every time I plug it in.

So best guess is that when a library is opened, something is going in and deciding to change stuff around only if a certain daemon or process or whatever happens to be running at the time. That's not official, just my guess. I have phone call scheduled today for more troubleshooting to isolate this and I will post again when I have more info. But if you can take a look at this and see if any of it matches your experience, please let me know.

My case is still open with Apple, though for some reason I have not heard back from my advisor since before the Super Bowl. However, I have been screenshotting everything in iTunes as I re-rate the tracks, album by album, and when a wipeout occurs I can go back and quickly fix everything. A couple of things I have noticed. First, when a wipeout occurs, it almost always happens when I plug in my iPod to sync (never so far with an iPhone or iPad), and only when I have listened to music on that iPod (I have 2). Second, it does not wipe out ratings every time I sync; there is still no discernible pattern beyond the fact that it is more likely to happen when the launch of iTunes by connecting an iPod takes place—but even then it’s not absolute. Third, it tends to go back and wipe out ratings from albums I have most recently re-rated ( after setting my library completely back to zero). It mostly wipes out four and five star ratings but will sometimes zero out a lesser rated track. It also tends to pick on some albums and tracks more than others for unknown reasons. Finally, it occasionally has a mega-wipeout where it not only resets tracks to zero, it actually changes the ratings of tracks (such as 4 to 2 or 1 to 5). It also will assign ratings to tracks I had left at zero, as well as sometimes moving forward in the library to sprinkle random ratings on tracks I have not yet reached in the re-rating process. These are much harder to spot and so I have had to do a lot of special tracking to find and fix all of this.

I will post again when I have more info.

One thing I can add is that the process by which it decides to alter ratings is not random but instead is based on some sort of algorithm. Even with automatic ratings turned off, there are too many patterns for it to be coincidence.

First, it never adds ratings to unplayed songs. I have about sixty-odd albums in iTunes that I have not yet listened to and not once through multiple crashes has it ever assigned a star rating to an unplayed track. Given the number of crashes I have had since December and the ratio of played to unplayed tracks it is highly unlikely that they have all been safe at random.

Second, it tends to pick on certain tracks over and over. While the specific tracks altered vary with each crash, the spreadsheet I have been keeping with a log of these issues shows a definite repetition, especially the mega-crashes where it changes ratings as well as wiping stuff out. Some tracks have been screwed up by iTunes at least 5 times now.

Finally, it tends to swap the ratings of adjacent tracks more often than altering them out of the blue. If a certain track on an album is rated 5 stars and the following track is rated 3 stars, for example, after a mega-crash the 5 star track will get changed to 3 stars and the 3 star track will get changed to 5 stars. Again, this pattern shows up far more than chance would dictate.

Keeping screenshots of everything after it is rated is the only way I have found to put things back, and the more tracks I rate the longer the rebuild process takes. After 6 months I am barely over 10% of the way to getting the entire library fixed, and even at this stage a mega-crash takes a week of solid work to rebuild.

My Apple case worker told me that he was going to forward this link to the engineers, but I suspect opening a case on your own will add weight to the process. The more people who complain and open cases, the more attention Apple will give it.

When I first discovered the gray star problem, I found that some albums which had automatic rating had two layers: incorrect blue star ratings and incorrect gray star ratings, sometimes both. For example, I might find an album which had all tracks set to three blue stars that I knew should not be that way. When I cleared those manual ratings that I had not applied, I found that there were another set of gray star ratings under them that I then had to re-set to zero. So the gray and blue star problems are indeed related. The gray star ones are an easy fix; the blue star not so much yet.

I did find another circumstance that seems to trigger blue star wipeouts, but I'm still testing it to see if it replicates on repeated happenings. I will post that here when the time comes if it holds up.

I have been working with Apple Support on this since last year. We do not have a fix yet but the case is still open and investigation is ongoing. The grey star problem and the blue star problem are two separate issues. I am curious if you sync your device or devices with iTunes through a desktop or not (as I do). This is where it's easiest to see the problem and take steps to fix it.

I just finished cleaning up from a really horrifying crash, which took me a week to completely restore. I’ve learned that there’s two different versions of this rating change behavior.

The first and more common (for me) kind is when plugging in an iPod causes iTunes to selectively erase the ratings of a few tracks that were recently rated. Since the rebuilding of my rating system involves listening to each track individually, it is fairly easy to track. By keeping a running count of how many total tracks have ratings assigned, I can tell when stuff has reset to unrated and the screenshots make it easy to go back and fix them. The deeper I get into the ratings, the more that window shifts to follow those recent tracks.

The second and rarer sort of crash is when it goes through the entire library and changes hundreds of tracks in various ways. In addition to wiping some tracks to unrated, it changes star ratings around either at random or in pairs. For example, if four given tracks in order were rated 4, 3, 2, 1 it might swap them to 1, 2, 3, 4. It also assigns seemingly random ratings to unrated tracks, and it does this not only for “past” unrated tracks (one’s I’ve listened to but decided a zero rating was appropriate) but also “future” tracks that have not been listened to at all since I wiped the entire library to unrated in December of 2019 so I could start the rebuilding process fresh. I can tell, too, by looking at the “future” tracks that the ratings are not anything like they were in the past, meaning they are either random or they are based on some algorithm that has nothing to do my tastes based on prior ratings or play counts, etc.

I still have yet to hear from my Apple advisor so work continues on rebuilding and trying to isolate a definable cause.

iCloud Match is probably changing your other metadata too, so you will want to check that. Year was the most common one for me, which is why I stopped using it. I tried to call my case worker today but his mailbox is full so I cannot leave him a message but he knows other people are chiming in on this thread and has said he will let Engineering know about the issue. I then called Apple Support and tried to get an update but my call was misrouted twice and finally dropped, so I will just wait a few days and try again

Thanks, that script helped BUT there were still some mysteries: first, the album ratings were not all grey, some were blue as if they had been manually assigned (they weren't). So after I ran the script on the grey ones, I had to go back individually on the blue star albums and manually assign no rating, at which point they changed to grey stars. I then had to run the script again to get them to disappear as well. However, neither of those restored the manual track ratings to their original value, so now I have to back through the 34,245 tracks one at a time and fix them as well. Thanks, Apple!

I don't use either Apple Music or iTune match, so I would have to know for sure when this change started. I only noticed it in the past couple of weeks. With 1,586 manually created playlists and 210 smart playlists, it will probably take me less time to just go through a line at a time and set them all back. But it's good to know what to do in the future if this should pop up again

Unfortunately this is not fixed after all. About 10 days after I wiped all ratings and started restoring them by hand, I had only gotten part way through the A's when I noticed they were getting changed again. Take a look at these two screenshots. The first one was made on 12/7 the day I started cleanup. The second one was taken today. The red arrows show the three changes on this page (there are 5 more which are just more of the same). You can see that in each case it took a song I had manually rated at 3 or 4 stars and wiped it out to zero stars. iTunes should never, ever, ever override a manual track rating with its own value, much less wipe it out completely.