Q: Hollow rating stars

No.  "Hollow" simply means you have not filled them in.

Actually, in certain displays, like this one, you could simply remove the "Rating" column from view, if you wish.

"Apple generated stars"???

"Pop up"???

I cannot imagine what you mean.  I am not aware of any ratings generated by anyone other than yourself for music that you own.

Perhaps a screen shot would help.

When you rate any song, iTunes automatically gives the album an average rating.

Likewise, if you rate an Album, iTunes automatically rates the songs.

The hollow staars are iTunes auto ratings, solid stars are yours.

Chris CA - thank you, now I've learned something and understand better.

So Spartyfan_1, please check this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH12163

What I understand from the article is that from View > Show View Options, you can change settings to remove these iTunes automatic ratings from view.

On my iTunes, I use Personal > Rating and not Personal > Album Rating.

Perhaps that is what you are looking for.

This is bugging the heII out of me as well.  I have a podcast that has over 400 episodes (it's a music podcast so I keep them all).  I have a hollow 4-star rating for the podcast under "Ratings", not "Album Ratings" (the latter has a 4-star solid rating but cannot be edited).  None of the individual podcast episodes have any ratings at all.

I cannot do anything to get rid of the hollow 4-star rating for the podcast.  Rating the podcast does indeed apply that rating to all the individual episodes, but if I then remove the rating from the overall Podcast, the rating goes away for all episodes and the hollow stars return.  No matter what combination of things I try, I can't make the hollow stars stop appearing, and automatically appearing on all episodes that don't have an individual rating of their own.

What is the deal with this?  I've seen no official explanation of this behavior that makes any sense.  I understand the idea of it being an average of the individual episode ratings, but that is clearly not the case here since my podcast has NO ratings on any episodes.  So what the heII??

Is there actually a solution for this?  Most of the threads I found on this go back several years or even as much as 5 or 6 years.  This is far from a new issue and it seems that it bugs an awful lot of people.

I've just noticed this happening too so that my smart playlists made from my own 5 solid stars, then noticing other songs in the playlist that were allocated 5 hollow stars by Apple! Very annoying.

However, I just downgraded all my own 5 solid stars to 4 solid stars and altered the smart playlist to look for 4 stars instead of 5. Problem solved.

I'll never use 5 stars again!

Since I sort my innumerable podcasts into playlists based on the number of stars I apply, I too am deeply annoyed that Apple insists on automatically rating my podcasts. I found a simple AppleScript that clears the hollow stars.

1. Open AppleScript Editor and paste in the code below.

2. Save the file to /Library/iTunes/Scripts. I call it Album Rating Reset. The script will then appear under the script menu in iTunes

3. Select any podcast the subscription that has been automatically rated and run the script.

tell application "iTunes"

  if selection = {} then

  display dialog "You must select one or more tracks first." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 with icon 1

  else

  set trackList to selection

  repeat with i from 1 to count of trackList

  set thisTrack to item i of trackList

  set album rating of thisTrack to (0)

  end repeat

  end if

end tell

ld

Thanks for that solution, Heather.

-Arthur

Thanks Heather. I mainly wanted this solution for my podcasts. I like to highlight my fave episodes from podcasts with 4 or 5 stars while listening to them on my iPod so that when I'm back at my computer I can save them.

I ran this script on two different podcasts. For one of them, I was able indeed able to keep the podcasts I had given a rating to. For the other one, once I ran the script, whatever my genuine ratings were are now gone

Now that I think about it, I think I was only able to save the ratings for that one podcast because once I got back to my computer, I had marked them on iTunes. My iPod is really old. It's 2nd gen so maybe that's why the ratings aren't translating right. That's a bummer.