How to stop iTunes automatic album rating?

I only clicked "This helped me" because I have been asking the same thing for such a long time. Now I don't feel so alone. I just can not see why anyone would want this feature or find it at all helpful!

Problem: Hollow stars populating on smart playlists, which are unable to be disabled- "My Top Rated" smart playlist

iTunes version: 12.2.1.16

64-bit

Windows 7

So I just called Apple support and tried to do a few work-arounds because they indicated that automatic rating of albums CANNOT be disabled. I found one method, which is not optimal, but is effective for my purposes, which is populating my "My Top Rated" smart playlist with songs that I alone select. This method uses the "Edit Playlist" function within the "My Top Rated" smart playlist without running a script.

Option 1: Setting parameters/"rule" based on stars ratings

Step 1: Open iTunes and select "My Top Rated" playlist.

Step 2: At the top of the playlist, all the way to the right, select "Edit Playlist"

Step 3: Be sure all desired songs to be added to your smart playlist meet your "Rating" requirement. In my case, I only want songs rated at 5 stars to be included on "My Top Rated". My rule is Rating is greater than four stars. Be sure the below settings are checked, you can also specify your ratings, (e.g., Rating is *****, or Rating is less than **). Now, if you are like me, I only want songs on my iPod if they are checked. If this is not how you organize your iPod this method will not work for you.

Step 4: At this point, you will still have the hollow stars on your smart playlist and that is fine, we're not done yet (see picture).

Step 5: Now, you can do a mass selection of hollow rated songs and do one of the two, or both of the options (for second option, see Option 2 below). Now you must SELECT AND RATE all hollow stars below or inconsistent with your rating rule (see picture below). For example, I had an album or collection of songs that were auto-rated following my rating of one song I wanted on my "My Top Playlist", in this case "Two Steps from ****- Shaken, not Stirred". I mass selected all the other songs in the playlist (second picture), using SHIFT + Left mouse click (to select a number of subsequent songs) or CTRL + Left mouse click (to select individual songs). I then right click once I have the appropriate songs that I do NOT want on "My Top Rated" playlist selected and rate them anything else that would not be consistent with my rule. Since my rule is that songs need 4 stars to be in the playlist, any song with a 1-star rating will be removed from the smart playlist.

Step 6: It is important to note, that these songs we have just rated are now rated as 1-star, which will be reflected in other playlists and your general music library. I found this to be an acceptable alternative since it got me what I wanted, but will ultimately be painful if I ever decided to organize my other playlists by rating.

Option 2: Manual rating of each song in an album

Step 1: This is obviously the most cumbersome and extremely inefficient. However, it can still be used in tandem with the rule setting from Option 1. If you use the smart playlist you can simply go down and rate each song consistent with the rules you specify (i.e. you want the song on your playlist) or not (i.e., you do not want the song on your playlist).

These four scripts can override or reset the auto-rating behaviour:

• ClearAlbumAutoRating
• ClearTrackAutoRating
• ResetAlbumAutoRating
• ResetTrackAutoRating

Select some tracks and run the selected script. If you change the album rating of one track all the others from the same album get automatically updated so if you process 30 tracks from 3 albums you may only see 3 updates in the results, but the script will have done the work. Use the Reset... scripts to restore the original AutoRating function. The Clear... scripts set a manual rating of 1% if the track is currently AutoRated and the Reset... scripts only restore AutoRating when the rating is 1%.

I'd suggest you Backup your iTunes for Windows library with SyncToy before you start, and test the script with a small sample before applying to the whole library.

tt2

This looks great, but I'm wary of using scripting/have no idea how to access the scripting viewer in iTunes. Any thoughts?

The scripts are plain text files written in Visual Basic Script that are interpreted by the Windows Scripting Host rather than iTunes. The script then communicates with iTunes, asking for the current rating or album rating of each selected track, and making the changes that are required to suppress (or restore) the auto-rating behaviour.

This is a direct link to the ClearAlbumAutoRating.vbs script. If you click on it normally you can review the text in your browser. If you right-click and use download or save as you can save a copy to your desktop, downloads folder, etc. You could then open the script with Notepad or Notepad++ to review the contents. Notepad++ adds colour coding to vb keywords which can make it easier to read the program.

To use any of the scripts select some tracks in iTunes, double-click the script to run it, and follow any prompts.

tt2

You are some kind of magician...worked perfectly. The track-specific script was the key for my problem. After clearing the ratings, if I re-rate any of the selected songs, the auto-rating system is re-enabled, but only for that specific song. Thanks so much for your work on this! 🙂

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2

tt2 it didn't work. It works for some but not others.

Does anyone have a similar script available for Mac? These look great, but I can't use them since I'm not on Windows.

Thanks - Todd

thank you sir - greatly appreciate your help.

You're most welcome. 🙂

tt2