Default Song/Album Ratings

I have a little more info to add: This problem might be being caused or at least exacerbated by my "estimated" album ratings--iTunes seems to compute by averaging the ratings for songs on the album that I have actually rated--somehow being converted from estimated ratings (which show as gray stars) to explicit ratings, which show up as black stars. The problem is that I never (and I mean NEVER) rate albums, I rate songs only, so any album ratings that are showing as explicit were derived by some mean other than me rating them.

I can't offer more insight than that at this point, but I'm going through and deleting all of my explicit album ratings, and I'll see if they return, maybe figure out at least what the scenarios are that cause this.

Possible explanation: In one of my iTunes playlists, the "Album Rating" column was displayed instead of the (song) Rating column. It's possible that I have been rating albums accidentally while meaning to rate individual songs, when listening to that playlist. I will continue to monitor and post any updates.

Some background on the terminology I'm using here:

User ratings: Ratings that are displayed as black stars, which one would think are made explicitly by the user--not as the result of a calculation.
Estimated ratings: Ratings that are displayed as grey stars, which seem to be calculated.

From what I can see, estimated album ratings are calculated by averaging the user ratings for the individual tracks on the album.

Similarly, from what I can see, estimated song ratings are carried over from the estimated album ratings. So as you rate songs, the album's rating is estimated. But if you rate albums, the songs' ratings are estimated.

Anyway, the problem I'm having persists, truly bizarre and inexplicable. Last weekend I spent probably an hour clearing all of the user ratings for albums in my iTunes library, which had the desired effect of clearing all of the estimated song ratings (I did this thinking that I may have been unintentionally rating albums, not songs, in iTunes). Then I spent the week listening to and rating music as I always do--on my iPhone. This weekend I reviewed my library on the Mac again, and about 50 albums had user ratings again. There's no way this came from something I did wrong or inadvertently--I only rate songs, as I listen to them, on the phone. The ramifications of these bogus user ratings on albums is that those ratings carry over to the individual, unrated tracks on those albums, affecting all of my smart playlists (which rely heavily on ratings).

So, I have again cleared all the user album ratings, but this time I also purged all the music from my phone and resynchronized all ~10K tracks to the phone again (after most of my album art disappeared). I will continue watching and trying to get to the bottom of how user ratings are being created for albums.

Hi Richard,

Yep--my approach is similar. I have a playlist called 'Keep in Rotation" which is for new stuff that I need to rate. I delete the tracks out of there after I've rated them.

So unless I'm missing something, the overall problem here is that iTunes is somehow adding user ratings (black stars) to albums that the user has not rated, which affects the track ratings, and thus the playlists. Is this your interpretation as well?

Hi Richard,

If my analysis is correct, it's clearly a bug and (if there were some way to get Apple to address it at all) they could hardly claim it's not. And the bug seems pretty simple, at least in my case: Under certain circumstances, albums are getting user ratings that are not performed by the user. Absent that bug, the albums would only have estimated ratings, and estimated ratings do not propagate to the individual tracks on the album.

Now, having said that, I still haven't figured out how it's happening. I listed to and rated some tracks on my phone today, then synchronized. No incorrect album ratings occurred. But I'll keep an eye on it and see what I can figure out.

There is no longer any doubt what's happening--only why. Every day this week, the songs I rated had the ratings applied properly only to the songs. Today, all the songs I rated created USER RATINGS (not estimated ratings) on the ALBUMS. Another 1/2 hour wasted removing album ratings...

Well, sad to say iOS 9 didn't fix it.

The irony is that unless programming has changed a lot over the years, someone wrote a line of code somewhere that references the wrong "rating" data element (i.e. points the update to the album rating instead of the song rating). But wherever that line of code exists, it's only triggered periodically (I have the issue about once a week). But you'd think it would be fairly easy to find/fix.

Still happening. So irritating. The net is that when I rate songs, the ratings are SOMETIMES applied to albums, but not as estimated ratings (greyed out), they're recorded as explicit ratings (in black). Someone wrote a bad line of code somewhere, and Apple hadn't seen fit to fix it yet. 😠

For what it's worth--this is still happening. I have to go in and "unrated" albums weekly to keep my playlists clean. Is it possible that Apple doesn't even know about this?