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How do I make Smart Playlists ignore album ratings?

I have a lot of Smart Playlists that rely on song ratings and I am continually having this problem of complete albums showing up on these playlists because iTunes has given them an album rating. I understand how iTunes assigns ratings to albums, but I do not understand why its using this album rating to select songs for Smart Playlists when there is a separate parameter that within the Smart Playlist settings. The problem is that I have an album with one song I like, so I rate that high, and the rest I don't like, so I rate them 0 stars, iTunes then takes the average of the rated songs, which is only one, so now any smart playlist treats every song as though its high rated.


I tried album list view and to manually override the album rating, but this doesnt let you make the album rating 0, it only lets you make it 1 star, which would be fine, except even when I change it to 1 star, for some reason my smart playlists arent respecting that 1 star album rating that i have assigned and are just ignoring it and putting the songs that used to have an album rating of two stars on the list anyway.


I don't care about the album rating, if it wants to auto rate albums, thats fine, but I just dont want Itunes to use those album ratings when assigning songs to smart playlists.


any help would be much appreciated

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Aug 19, 2012 11:31 AM

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Posted on Feb 24, 2013 7:37 AM

The ratings are actually on a 100-point scale.


To set "hollow" album star ratings to zero stars, use the following applescript:

tell application "iTunes"


activate

set results to (every file track of playlist "Library" whose album rating kind is computed)

repeat with t in results

try

set album rating of t to 1

end try

end repeat

end tell


To set "hollow" song star ratings to zero stars, use the following:

tell application "iTunes"


activate

set results to (every file track of playlist "Library" whose rating kind is computed)

repeat with t in results

try

set rating of t to 1

end try

end repeat

end tell


Technically they won't be rated zero, they'll be rated 1 out of 100, which rounds to zero stars. Rating at zero stars is apparently the equivalent of telling iTunes to calculate the value it thinks the rating should be.


I had this same frustrating problem in that I have a Smart Playlist of 5-star albums and when I've only rated one or two songs at a high enough value iTunes was adding the album to the playlist even though I hadn't heard enough of the album to give it a rating as a whole.

13 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Feb 24, 2013 7:37 AM in response to poil66

The ratings are actually on a 100-point scale.


To set "hollow" album star ratings to zero stars, use the following applescript:

tell application "iTunes"


activate

set results to (every file track of playlist "Library" whose album rating kind is computed)

repeat with t in results

try

set album rating of t to 1

end try

end repeat

end tell


To set "hollow" song star ratings to zero stars, use the following:

tell application "iTunes"


activate

set results to (every file track of playlist "Library" whose rating kind is computed)

repeat with t in results

try

set rating of t to 1

end try

end repeat

end tell


Technically they won't be rated zero, they'll be rated 1 out of 100, which rounds to zero stars. Rating at zero stars is apparently the equivalent of telling iTunes to calculate the value it thinks the rating should be.


I had this same frustrating problem in that I have a Smart Playlist of 5-star albums and when I've only rated one or two songs at a high enough value iTunes was adding the album to the playlist even though I hadn't heard enough of the album to give it a rating as a whole.

Feb 24, 2013 11:10 AM in response to poil66

Sorry, those are both text for AppleScripts. Just past either block of text into an AppleScript Editor window (Applications > Utilities > AppleScript Editor) and click the "Run" button.


This will work for your existing tracks, but new tracks will exhibit the same problem, so you may want or need to run this periodically depending on your needs.

Sep 1, 2015 3:26 AM in response to poil66

I created a script with just the album rating example given in the suggested answer (reasoning if I got rid of those, the light grey track ratings would follow).


I added it in the iTunes folder and executed on a 100k+ collection. It ran for hours, but as far as I can see in the end, didn't remove any hollow track ratings.


Is it necessary to specifically remove computed track ratings once they're assigned, or did something not work with the removing computed album ratings?

Sep 17, 2015 6:10 PM in response to poil66

The script does not work. Switching to Album View and right-clicking on album cover and selecting Album Rating>None does not work. Nothing works. Apple does not care. This problem has been posted about since at least 2009.


If it's only your smart playlists based on ratings that are munged, just edit them to include the condition:

Album Rating is less than 1


Your rated songs remain, and the songs with no ratings other than the album rating will disappear.

Sep 20, 2015 7:46 AM in response to poil66

This seems to be working for me. I had to run the script 3 times so far because iTunes or the Script itself froze up, but so far I've whittled my smart playlist down from 22,000+ songs to 4533 and still counting down to the actual intended size of 2200 or so. Long term though, I wish Apple would give more flexibility to iTunes users to change this within the iTunes "Get Info" UI for multiple tracks selected, rather than running a script.

Aug 24, 2016 7:16 AM in response to poil66

I just wanted to thank you because after much scouring the net, this thread is what led to my fixing the problem.


I slightly modified the script above to set the album rating of EVERY track in my library to 1. I don't use album ratings and never have. This immediately got rid of all "computed" song ratings and returned my library to normalcy.


I'm trying to figure out why this feature even exists? It doesn't seem useful at all and so far seems to have only caused people problems. If even one person sees this and likes this feature, say something? I'm curious.

How do I make Smart Playlists ignore album ratings?

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