I am trying to create a smart playlist that contains all songs that I have not rated. Songs with grey (calculated) ratings are being excluded. How can I include them in this playlist. I want to load an iPod with these songs so that I can run through them and rate them as I go. There does not seem to be a way to differentiate between grey and black stars.
Hi DustyMac,
I don't think any of us have found a solution to this. The workaround I've been using is to maintain a regular playlist called To Be Rated, into which I immediately drag everything new as soon as I add it to my library. I keep this list sorted by Rating, so that when I play and rate the songs, they will be listed at the top, and periodically I peek into this list and delete the rated tracks.
Please share any better solutions if you come up with them!
Hi DustyMac,
I don't think any of us have found a solution to this. The workaround I've been using is to maintain a regular playlist called To Be Rated, into which I immediately drag everything new as soon as I add it to my library. I keep this list sorted by Rating, so that when I play and rate the songs, they will be listed at the top, and periodically I peek into this list and delete the rated tracks.
Please share any better solutions if you come up with them!
What I did to resolve the issue for myself was to check for any black stars in the album rating. I generally don't use this field myself, so there weren't a lot that I had to fix.
Last Christmastime I created a smart Playlist called Favourite Albums for all tracks where the album rating (grey) was 5 stars. I had manually set some albums to 3 or 4 stars in order to exclude incomplete albums. When I later added the remaining songs from those albums, they inherited the album ratings for the songs, thus screwing up my song rating-based playlists. I had also added a few new favourite albums in the meantime and shortcutted the process by rating the albums 5 stars.
I had to go back over all songs added over the last year and remove the manual album ratings where appropriate. Curiously, you can't do it in song view, but only in album view, so there was a lot of back and forth between the two views.
I can't remove them all or my Favourite Albums playlist will be messed up. I will have to be vigilant whenever I add tracks to check for manual album ratings that need to be cleared. As it sits today, they only exist for incomplete albums.
I wish iTunes had a value for album is complete/incomplete that could be used for smart playlists.
I would also like a "play only when shuffling" option for various comedy albums to intersperse with my music.
How do I ignore grey star ratings in smart playlist based on song ratings?
