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

If the album rating you cannot remove is grey, that's normal; it is the automatic album rating, which does not add any automatic song ratings to the album's songs.

If, however, the colour of the album rating you cannot remove is black, please explain what you mean by 'can't even clear'.

Exactly. Grey song ratings mean that the album they belong to has a manual black album rating, which normally should not be added automatically. If you remove the album's black rating, the songs' grey ratings will go away.

I traced the issue back to the same cause as you. Any ratings added on an iPhone or iPod automatically puts the same rating on the whole album. I was hoping the latest update would fix the issue but it has not. I've already complained to Apple about it, not sure what else can be done to remedy this.

I have this exact same problem and it's really destroying my faith in an iTunes based Mac setup.

I've been an iPhone user in the past but had until recently been in a phase of using a PC/Android and only just returned to iPhone 6 as well as a MacBook Pro. Since that time everything has worked fine with a very large music collection, but this issue started appearing in the past few weeks - tracks on albums I had just rated, "hollow star" rating the rest of the tracks on the album, and then adding these tracks to my ratings based playlists automatically.

Based on the timing and the fact this wasn't happening in my first 1-2 months of iPhone / MacBook, I can only assume it's the new iPhone Music App or some recent update to iTunes? Really want a solution to remove all hollow star ratings (and ideally prevent them being auto-rated in future). Horrible bug (or feature, if that's what Apple think it is!?!)

They are two things, a feature AND a bug.

The feature (Automatic Rating) works as explained below.

Automatic Album Ratings:

- if you manually rate songs (black song star), the album they belong to gets an average automatic rating (grey album star)

- any songs of that album that you have not rated remain unrated

Automatic Song Ratings:

- if you manually rate an album (black album star), the songs of that album that you have not rated get the exact same automatic rating too (grey song star)

However, the bug (as far as as I've seen) is that iTunes puts black album stars by itself, which is not normal because black star = manual rating.

As you'd expect, the unrated songs of those albums get an automatic rating too.

This is major problem because:

a) Smart Playlists list both automatic and manual ratings, which messes everything up,

b) the iPhone sees both automatic and manual ratings as black stars, which leads to confusion, and

c) there is no way to quickly un-rate these albums, you have to do them one by one

Thankfully, it only messes up album ratings; because if it were adding black stars to songs, I don't how I would cope. Still, this has to be fixed ASAP!

Thanks alx1, you've summed it up better than me. I have that exact problem and it's driving me mad - and I have a music collection of over 1TB / 100,000 tracks (legal - I have 3000 CDs for a start plus thousands of bought MP3s). I just had a company rip my 3000 CDs and it's painful at the moment rating them to build iPhone playlists and finding Apple is making its own ratings and adding all kinds of tracks to my playlist and sync.

I did find this suggestion and have implemented the two scripts in my scripts menu under iTunes:

How do I make Smart Playlists ignore album ratings?

I have the album one running now, unfortunately it's been running already for 20 minutes (based on the size of my collection) and I have no idea how much longer it might run for! So not exactly the most desirable or agile solution, and I have no idea if it's actually going to work!

Yes it should be a bug.

But I think this is what is happening from what I've observed. If you have rated a certain percentage of the songs in an album, it decides it knows enough to rate the album (in black). Sometimes you only have 1,2, or 3 songs from an album and have rated them all, so the album gets rated.

Obviously this is bad. At the very least you should have the option to turn this off. I use the fact i have not rated things as a way to find certain songs, for example.

In general my biggest problem with Apple the last 4-5 years is they just decide what they think is best for you, changing more than a decade of behavior, and often not even telling anyone. If you want to add something new, fine. If you want to change default behavior on new libraries, fine. You shouldn't ever change the default behavior on existing libraries, especially something as critical to the whole system as song ratings.

Completly agree - this is a really annoying bug

It was working now it's not

Very annoying this hasn't been resolved yet.

Smart playlists are useless now

The observation that only songs rated by an iphone or ipad received the black (not grey) album rating was the key for me. The iTunes rating logic is working as expected. The issue is that a sync with the device is adding the black rating to an album.

The work-around (too bad there has to be one) is to not rate songs on the device, but only on the computer. Hopefully this can be fixed soon to eliminate this work-around.

Thanks to everyone who has posted here, and especially to tt2 for his scripts!

I had hoped that tt2's script "ResetAlbumAutoRating.vbs" would fix the problem, but it does not.

So, I looked at the code and modified one line which does fix the problem of removing all bogus "manual" Album Ratings. I have renamed the script to "ResetAlbumAutoRating - Always.vbs" and here is the function you need to modify:

-- BEGIN vbs CODE

' Test for tracks which can be usefully updated

' Modified 2013-01-12

Function Updateable(T)

With T

' Modified 9/30/2016 9:27PM by gk

' Updateable=(.AlbumRatingKind=0 And .AlbumRating=1) ' Only process UserRated tracks set to 1%

Updateable=(1)

End With

End Function

-- END vbs code

Previously, the script would simply say that the selected track(s) "did not need updating"

Now, if you run with the modified function it will always update successfully.

Probably tt2 could make this more elegant but at least I got it working - saves a lot of time!

Though I haven't confirmed the cause of this problem, I have always suspected that the problem is related to syncing iPhone. I only recently got an iPhone [used to use iPod mini and iPod Touch] and have never used or set Album Ratings, yet, within the last year I have noticed these rating appear as if they have been manually set - which then causes previously unrated songs to appear as rated - thereby mucking up my entire library.

Unfortunately, I think we can say that Apple must not regard this as a bug, since nobody at Apple seems to have taken notice in over a year now, since the problem was first reported. [I remember back in the good old days, when Apple tried harder, and I used to work at Apple - even non-developers could log in to the Radar bug database and file bugs. No longer can we even get any official acknowledgement of serious bugs. "See no evil.." policies gone beserk.]

I also have a very large mp3 library [over 1 TB] and this is a very serious problem.

Sadly, I have to say that we should all realize that if we value our music, which should be very worried at how Apple has, without warning or apology, begun corrupting our valuable data.

As for me, after years of suffering, I have concluded that now is the time to begin moving away from the Apple / iOS platform.