How can I enable half-star ratings in.Sequoia Apple Music

I accidentally discovered a partial "hack" (a half hack, if you will). On my M1 Mac Studio, at least, any song can be rated with half-stars as long as I'm viewing it in "Songs" (as opposed to in its album or playlist settings, where Music still insists on full stars only). I'm on 15.1.1 right now, but I think I stumbled upon this at an earlier version of Sequoia. It's only a half hack, because even after tweaking a rating, say, from 4 stars to 4.5 while in Songs, the same track will continue to default to a full star neighbour when I view it elsewhere. Still, it's occasionally helpful when I'm reviewing my library in "Songs" mode. One can continue to hope that some day Apple will acquire the "intelligence" to make this very useful user customization available across all Apple Music sorting categories. I get that they're on a limited budget, but I think this should be a priority.

This is my first regret after updating to Sequoia just a couple hours ago. "Apple Intelligence" was the bait. But what kind of intelligence thinks it's better to have to rate music -- in effect -- either 80 out of 100 or 100/100, than to have the nuance afforded by 90 out of 100, among other gradations made possible with half stars?

I really want this to be possible again as well (I also hate the new look of the faded stars for anything that isn't rated, although I suppose I'll get used to it).

That said, one sort-of work around that is working in the meantime is to use another app to read/write the star ratings. I've been using an app called Song Rating for a long time that sits in the menu bar and displays the rating of the currently playing song. It has an option to enable half-star ratings, and it will read the proper half-star ratings from the songs when they start playing, while also allowing you to write half-star ratings to the songs by rating it through the app.

Sucks that you still can't see all of the proper song ratings in the list in Apple Music, but at least I know they're still there and am still able to rate that way if they ever come back in a future update.

Does anyone have any other app ideas, or insight into the future of this feature? Apple has been de-emphasizing star ratings vs the binary “like” or “love” marking for a while so I am worried that this is only going to get worse, but I’m just extrapolating. The limited interest in this thread worries me.

While I understand the value of the suggest more/less tag for the Apple Music service, this is distinct from the value of a personal rating system. Both are good! Please do both!! We can handle it ;)

Can't hurt to try and reboot. I had had a recent reboot due to a crash (unrelated, as far as I know), but when re-applied the defaults command from above I was able to use half stars immediately.

So, I have no reason to think the reboot was necessary but perhaps it played a role.

Good luck.

No such luck here (i.e. half stars still in some views, but not all), even after closing and reopening Music. Do you need to restart MacOS to get it to work?

I'm fairly confident half-stars may work again in the 15.1 release. See https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2021/10/new-batch-rate-with-half-stars-v1-0/ for another tool that can batch rate tracks for you.

tt2

Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work for me. I'm on one of the last Intel iMacs, also 15.1.1. I'll poke around and see if there is a combination of settings that work: your case suggests there might be something here.

They do work within smart playlists if you view those playlists “as Songs.”

Also working for me in Artist view (which is great because 95% of my usage is playlists and smart playlists in songs view or Artists. So I’m almost back to how things were working for me before.

I re-applied the defaults command, and now I can assign and see half-stars in playlists again!! (I'm on 15.1.1)

Thanks everyone! I haven't fully explored where this does and doesn't work, but I've got something now.

I just realized now -- after searching in Terminal -- that I first applied the command back on October 29. Many restarts and reboots have transpired since then until I reapplied it tonight. Mysterious are the ways of MacOS...