When importing a CD into ITunes, iTunes has the capabilty to pull in the detail. Why doesn't it pull in the ratings automatically? Other applications do it but not ITunes.
I would love to be able to setup playlists based on industry ratings vs. manually marking each song. I have almost 4000 songs (yes they're legal) and it's an impossible task to mark each one.
Ipod, Windows XP Pro
The rating system in iTunes (and Windows Media Player, Winamp, MediaMonkey et al) allows you to set your personal rating. There currently no feature to allow iTunes to import ratings from third party services. Drop a line to iTunes Feedback with the suggestion if you like.
tt2
Huh?
Have I understood you correctly?
You want your choice of songs, in your Library, to be rated with someone else's choice on how much you like the songs.
Wow!
Fiend - I don't know how you made the leap to from wanting access to industry standard ratings to having the manual capability removed. I have used other rating services that provide the star ratings and I found them helpful in creating playlists. Especially when there is a large number of songs to sort/select.
If I was doing the design, I would have a field for user ratings and another field with industry standard ratings for other prople to use. I'd probably have an option to comingle or copy feature of the two for maximum flexability.
Instead of a "smart" response, perhaps you should look at the potential of the request.
I'm sure you'll have another "smart" retort which I'll be happy to ignore.
We're fellow users here. As before you can send the suggestion to iTunes Feedback. Frankly I'm not interested in third party ratings of my media but I suppose there might be some merit in it as an additional piece of information, not that you made that suggestion originally...
Drawbacks: Manual track and album ratings plus automatic track and album ratings derived from manual ones already cause enough confusion, particularly when smart playlists become involved. Which third party rating service are you going to use? Who is to pay for the data? Apple or the user? Or did you just want the iTunes Store popularity rating which I presume is based on store download rates and is therefore probably skewed to recent releases?
tt2
Perhaps you haven't explained clearly enough, because I'm none the wiser. I made the association, not leap, from the post you left and actually asked if I had understood you correctly.
Many people here are probably aware of my sometimes caustic reponses, but I genuinely cannot see the merit in having industry ratings imposed on a personal collection. I would hate it.
Along the lines that tt2 has mentioned, I have experience of marking a song with a rating, only to find the whole album marked with that same rating, when it's most definitely not what I wanted. It makes it impossible to mark songs on an album with different ratings, and I have had to battle with one or two albums to get them rated with my preferred rating, not someone else's.
Anyway, as tt2 has suggested, you can send your idea as feedback to Apple, which makes more sense than posting your questio here. Especially as, to answer your original question music ratings - why isn't it automated?, would call for speculation on our part about an Apple decision, which is forbidden by Apple in their forums.
Yes your reply was a bit caustic hence my intial response.
I completely agree with the issue regarding the loss of being able to rank a single song. Individual song ranking was a feature a while back but something changed in a later release (either deliberate or perhaps a defect that hasn't been fixed). When I updated a song and it updated the entire album, that's the last time I used Apple's ranking field. Not at all useful in my thinking and I haven't played with it since.
Many years ago with Windows Media, the song information downloaded included the "industry" ranking. This was helpful when you have 1000's of songs to manage. The user could create playlists leveraging what the "industry" experts thought was a 5 star song. You got a fairly decent playlist although there were songs I didn't necessarily agree. The software provided the user the option to override/modify. Another way to think of it, lets say you have 4000 songs in your library. If you disagree with 50% of the rankings then only 50% had to be modified. It saved a lot of keystrokes.
I'll give my feedback to apple but I have found that potential enhancements that have a lot of activity in a forum sometimes bubble to the top of the list more quickly.
Thanks for your responses
ccooper737 wrote:
The user could create playlists leveraging what the "industry" experts thought was a 5 star song. You got a fairly decent playlist although there were songs I didn't necessarily agree.
I have well over 4000 songs in my Library (as a result of years of collecting) but I wouldn't place any faith in industry rankings. None at all.
Sorry, but that's my opinion. You are entitled to yours, and I'm not knocking you.
music ratings - why isn't it automated
