How can I clear the album rating for all of my songs?

Hi,

I have a potential work around to this, not sure if it will help.

If you find the album in question in your My Music tab in the Artists view you can see the album rating on the right hand side. You can then set the Album rating to zero and it will update all the tracks in that album.

Not sure why Apple have this new bug, it's playing havoc with my playlists!

I have followed this new bug, and I believe I understand what it does.

Before 12.2, iTunes has an automatic album rating system:

• you rate a song of a certain album with 2 stars and another with 4 stars

• the album automatically takes an average 3-star rating

• you can also manually rate an album, overriding the automatic rating

• manual ratings are black, automatic ratings are grey

• when you manually rate an album, the rest of the songs of the album get an automatic (grey) rating as well

All is is normal.

However, in 12.2 and 12.2.1, I see that some albums get an automatic black rating, as if I have manually rated them (which I haven't).

This is very inconvenient, as it adds automatic grey ratings to many songs I have not even listened to yet, thus invalidating most of my smart playlists (my library relies on ratings a lot).

I tried to create a Smart Playlist, so that I can manually un-rate them, but it will list all my albums, both manually and automatically rated, which are many hundreds.

So, right now, the only solution to this is to manually un-rate any such albums every time I notice such black album rating, which can take a long time, since iTunes keeps rating new albums every now and then.

Here are four scripts that 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

You're missing the point.

I have 2567 albums, and I have gone through all of them and cleared this 'manual' album rating, but it keeps adding random 'manual' (black) ratings to some albums after I rate a certain song of an album, thus also adding automatic (grey) ratings to songs I have not rated or sometimes not even played yet, thus messing up my Rated playlists.

This usually happens after I rate songs on my iPhone and sync it with iTunes, which is what I normally do so that the play count & ratings are synced back to my main iTunes library.

Try this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7152041

It is a workaround by by resetting your iTunes library. It should work likewise for Windows, too

Hi terdinatore,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

However, deleting all my ratings and starting over is not an option! In my iTunes library I rely mainly on ratings to sort everything. I have many thousands of songs rated 5-star, 4-star, etc, which I've spent many years to arrange. That's why all this is so annoying.

I'm hoping a future update fixes this eventually (I have submitted this to apple.com/feedback of course).

Hello alx1 !

you will only lose your play count - the ratings are going to be restored in the last step!

Perhaps try to read it again - You create playlists with the ratings to get them back later

Sorry, I read the paragraphs in bold and got scared 🙂.

Still, I don't really need to do this (I read thru the whole page this time); I have already manually removed all the album ratings in my library, one by one, altho it took me a while.

The issue I was reporting is that iTunes 12.2 keeps adding manual (black) ratings automatically every now and then, which is an oxymoron, it should not be possible for manual ratings to be added automatically.

In my case, it does this once every few days, adding a black-star rating to 3-4 albums each time.

So I don't think a clean new iTunes library is what I need, unless you think it will make this behaviour go away.

I have a feeling they made some changes in iTunes 12.2 that are causing this, perhaps somehow related to the Ratings menus that they also removed.

terdinatore wrote:

you will only lose your play count

And date added, skip count, last played, last skipped, loved, other playlist membership, store downloaded artwork, checked status, (basically anything not embedded in tags) and you may get an erase and sync warning next time you try to sync any of your devices. And I still don't think it will change the behaviour of iTunes with regard to auto-ratings.

tt2

alx1 wrote:

In my case, it does this once every few days, adding a black-star rating to 3-4 albums each time.

That doesn't sound right. I assume these aren't syncing from your devices or home shared computers.

You could try downloading my script ExportImport and tweak it so that it only exports ratings. If random ratings then occur you might have the opportunity to first see if there is a discernible pattern, and then use the script to reimport your archived ratings.

tt2

Of course it doesn't sound right.

And no, they are not syncing from or to any devices. I've never rated any albums in my life, I only rate songs (and then iTunes gives the all-familiar grey automatic ratings to the albums the songs I've rated belong to, which is normal and expected). See my original comment above for a description of what I've seen happen.

As for the script you suggest, I won't be bothered, I'll keep manually removing those black ratings from my albums whenever I come across them. I'll leave it to Apple to look for 'discernible patterns', if they will investigate this minor bug.

I've noticed with my smart playlists that use star ratings to make their selections that even when I use the song rating filter iTunes is still picking songs with the grey ratings like if I used the album rating filter. This didn't happen before Apple Music and the new version of iTunes

HI Mad4wdw,

I don't think this is correct. I believe smart playlists always used to list both black and grey ratings. I'll try to find a computer at work that has an earlier version of iTunes to test this.

The point, however, is that iTunes 12.2 keeps automatically rating albums it shouldn't. I've seen it spontaneously adds manual black ratings to some albums (and the songs that belong to these albums get the automatic grey stars, which is normal). If you did not manually rate the albums of the songs you saw, then this is what happened to you, too.

I've got this problem too. Very annoying.