Grey vs Black Rating Stars (in iTunes) [screenshot]

Yes, this is broken. Once again, iTunes and the ios Music App are screwed and we will have to wait another whole year before anything is fixed. They will fix it but another bug making the app unusable will come.

1000$ for a phone, and we have a very low overall quality. Apple doesn't realise that the quality of a product is not given by the highest quality of a component, but by the weakest. This is the bottleneck principle.

One of the downside of this approach is filtering lists by rating. For example, I have a SmartPlaylist that finds all songs played more than say 10 times which I have not yet rated (high or low) - it's called "Songs to Rate as 3 stars". However, when filtering by "Rating" of 0 stars, instead of finding the matching songs (ie, those that aren't rated), it finds nothing because it sees the 'inherited' (album) rating as a valid rating. [And yes, there are a ton of songs that match this criteria]

Apple, please set Rating in SmartPlaylists to truly see the song rating, not the inherited rating.

From what I can tell:

• Black stars are user ratings--ratings you entered explictly.
• Grey stars are estimated ratings--calculated from your user ratings.

Furthermore:

• When you give songs user ratings, the estimated rating for the album is calculated as the average of the album's songs' user ratings.
• When you give an album a user rating, that rating is carried over to the estimated ratings for any unrated song on that album.

To get Rid of Album Rating (Grey Stars) -

When you add a column view called 'Album Rating' (right click on Column Header and select Album Rating), it adds an Album Rating item in your right click menu also called Album Rating directly below Song Rating.

Return to Album View, right click on the album cover and select NONE in Album Rating and it clears it....

Everyone is sooo confused by Ratings, Album Ratings, Stars and Hearts, and how to use them to make smart playlists. Some useful answers came up in this discussion:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7164642?start=0&tstart=0

See Re: Handling grey stars for Mac OS X scripts. The scripts as written suppress or restore auto-rating behaviour (grey stars) leaving manually rated albums & tracks (black stars) alone. If you want all manually rated album ratings removed as well then in the first script change the line that reads:

if album rating kind of aTrack is computed then set album rating of aTrack to 1

to

set album rating of aTrack to 1

All four scripts run with the current selection of tracks so you can test them out on a small group of tracks first.

tt2

That sounds better than "this is an album rating". I have never rated an album, and de-rating it has not removed the gray stars. Although I wouldn't be surprised if the Apple Gods actually made a bug...

Why aren't my ratings syncing from my phone? I rate my music on my phone and then sync to my itunes to manage my library. Songs I rate on my phone

are showing up grey instead of black in itunes after I sync my phone.....

Still happening to me, too, randomly. Once a week I go in and unrate all the albums that have user ratings that I never gave them.

I still think this is a single line of code somewhere referencing the wrong rating field, and is just not important enough to Apple for anyone to go in and fix it.

yep! i'm sure you're right. it doesn't work and there is no sign of anyone fixing it.

there are a few people writing scripts that may or may not work; personally i'm not trusting my hard drive, 2'500 albums and 6,000 songs to someone else's scripting ability, when Apple themselves obviously can't get it right.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2498439?start=0&tstart=0