Is there a way to stop iTunes from automatically assigning album ratings?

1. This seems to be a bug. You can report problems via the relevant feedback form, e.g. iTunes Feedback, or sign up for a free Apple Developer Connection account and make use of Apple Bug Reporter.
   
2. You can edit album ratings individually where the album rating is shown in various views in iTunes, although in the Songs view you must show and expand the left-hand artwork column and use the control there, the Album Rating column isn't active.

Use my ClearTrackAutoRating script to supress track auto ratings.

tt2

Perfect! Your info allowed me to manually remove all the album star ratings that had creeped into my iTunes library. I was then able to recreate my playlists that use the song's stars.

I'm not sure how the album stars got created. My guess is that when I changed the rating of songs on my iPhone it created album stars. During a workout I use Siri to change the star rating of songs I'm listening to - (Hey Siri) "Rate this song 3 stars".

Thanks again for your post. It solved my problem.

tt2

No star rating appears with the artwork. The stars in the Album Rating column can't be edited. Here's my workaround: assigning a single star to the songs. No script needed as you can bulk apply a single star to as many songs as you want. Yes?

In the Songs view enable album art, make the artwork column wide enough to show the text and album rating to the right of the artwork. This album rating control works.

See Re: Handling grey stars for Mac scripts that suppress (or restore) the autorating behaviour.

tt2

If you’re having trouble creating a ‘My Top Rated’ playlist because of the way iTunes mucks about with your ratings, try the following steps on your main computer (Mac or Windows):

• Go to My Music. Look at your list of Songs (make sure you have Songs not Albums in the top right corner).
• Right click on any column heading and you’ll see a list of things you can have as columns. Make sure you have a tick next to both Rating and Album Rating. This will help you see what’s happening.
• In your list of Songs, see if you can now get rid of some of the Ratings you don’t want. There might be black ratings or grey ratings. You should be able to edit black ratings but not grey ones. To edit a rating, click on a star and slide to the left. You can slide left all the way to zero. If you can get rid of some of the black ones the grey ones might disappear as well. At this point your problem may or may not be fixed. If you can get rid of all the ratings you don’t want - hurrah!
• If there are ratings you can’t edit, don’t despair. If you can edit Album Ratings but you have thousands of them and you don’t want to go through them one by one, don’t despair, read on. If you have iTunes 12.3.2 like me, you won’t be able to edit Album ratings at all. That’s OK. Read on.
• Normally, getting rid of a black album rating should get rid of grey song ratings. If you can’t edit Album Ratings, or if there are too many to do one by one, do the following. Click on the column heading for Album Rating, to sort all your songs by this column. This should bring together a lot of the songs you want to edit.
• Click on a song at the top of a group you want to edit and then shift click on the song in the bottom of the group. All the songs you want to edit should now be highlighted. Right click on the highlighted group and click on Get Info. You should get a message asking you if you want to edit multiple songs at once. Click on Edit Items.
• The list you get should contain a little Rating bar, but here’s the trick: Don’t set the song rating to zero. Set it to one star. If you put it to zero, iTunes will consider that you have not rated the items and will let the Album Rating take over and put in grey stars. If you put in one black star, this overrides grey stars.
• Having one star should keep all these songs out of your Top Rated list.

Did this work? Please let me know with a reply.

Hi turingtest2, love your work! In iTunes 12.3.2 Album Ratings are present, but can't be edited! Stars no longer appear beside album art and you can't edit them in the Songs list. Album Ratings have been replaced by the heart, which you can turn on or off. Although you can no longer edit the Album Rating, any manual Album Ratings that have ever been made will still put grey stars in song Rating. Looks to me like Apple are half way through abandoning Album Ratings, but it's been left in a bit of a mess. The above worked for me after a long and expensive call to Apple Support. I've been promised follow-up, so they recognise that it's a mess. I'd love to hear your opinion.

Sorry, my mistake, as you say album rating isn't shown in the current version of Get Info. I could update my script ClearAlbumAutoRating so it has an option to force a new rating regardless of the current rating. Currently it only processes albums that are autorated.

tt2

HI,

You shouldn't need to adjust the Updatable function in those scripts. Auto-ratings are applied automatically when the manual rating is 0% or unrated. The scripts set a manual rating of 1% which suppress autorating only when the current track or album is autorated. This lets you continue to apply manual ratings when you wish to. If you don't use the scripts albums will get an autorating from the mean average of any rated tracks, and unrated tracks will gain an autorating if the album is rated. I suppose there might be cases where you need to tweak smart playlist rules a little. For example use rating is less than 1 star rather than rating is 0 stars if setting to 1% manages to include tracks that should have been excluded, although testing here I seem to get the same results which suggest iTunes is rounding down.

tt2