Why can't I remove greyed-out star ratings?

Question

Why can't I remove greyed-out star ratings?

A rather odd thing has happened. Some of my tracks have greyed-out star ratings, see the graphic below. Tracks 1 and 5 are star ratings that I set. But I did not set the greyed out 2-star ratings to tracks 2 3 & 4. I can't remove the greyed ratings: all I can do is reset them to a half-star rating (I have an app to do that). On those tracks to which I have applied a half-rating, I can remove it in the same way one can remove any level of rating; but if I do that on a greyed rating, it simply resets itself to two greyed-out stars.

Posted on Feb 28, 2016 9:11 AM

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Answer 1

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Top-ranking reply

Kenichi Watanabe

Level 8

41,578 points

Mar 5, 2016 2:19 PM in response to Neville Goodman1

Thing oddity appears sometimes; seems to be a "bug" where the Album Rating for a song gets applied to the song's Rating. The Album Rating is the calculated average of all songs on the album, that you have rated. Songs on the album with no entered Rating receive this "grey stars" Rating, instead of being blank. In your screenshot, the average Rating for the four rated songs is apparently two stars.

You can remove them using iTunes with some manual steps. Show your iTunes music library using the Albums view (selected from control at right end of horizontal bars). This shows your music library with album artwork tiles. Find and select the album with this problem. Right-click the album artwork, and Album Rating -> None.

Hopefully that still works. I don't have any "grey stars" in my iTunes library (and it's been a while since I had this issue), so I can't confirm this works with the current iTunes like it did before.

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

276,725 points

Sep 13, 2016 10:45 AM in response to Neville Goodman1

Grey star album ratings are based on the mean average rating of the manually rated tracks of an album.

Grey star track ratings are based on a manual album rating.

A manual rating of zero enables auto rating to occur.

Anecdotal reports suggest that recent builds of iTunes may occasionally sync manual track ratings made on a device into manual album ratings in the library.

See Re: Handling grey stars for scripts that set manual ratings of 1% to suppress auto-rating behaviour.

tt2

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Answer 3

Sep 13, 2016 1:36 AM in response to Kenichi Watanabe

Hi,

This worked when you first suggested it, but it no longer works for me. And a number of my previously assigned personal track ratings have disappeared, with the album given an overall, and unremovable, grey star rating. Any thoughts on this? Have grey stars reappeared in your library?

thanks!

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Answer 4

Sep 13, 2016 4:45 AM in response to turingtest2

Thanks for the tip. I put one of the scripts into the script folder for iTunes, selected some tracks, clicked on the script from the drop-down menu, but nothing happened. I'm not sure what I am doing wrong.

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Answer 5

turingtest2

Level 10

276,725 points

Sep 13, 2016 10:45 AM in response to Neville Goodman1

Did you select some tracks that were showing with grey stars? ClearAlbumAutoRating clears grey album ratings, ClearTrackAutoRating clears grey track ratings. There isn't any other visual feedback, but once you've used them future rating changes which normally cause an auto rating to appear won't, unless you've subsequently cleared the 1% rating by setting and clearing a rating, or with the reset scripts.

tt2

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Answer 6

Sep 13, 2016 10:45 AM in response to turingtest2

Thanks - I did select some tracks, but wrongly used the ClearAlbum. The ClearTrack did the trick. Mind you I'm still not sure how some of the tracks that I know I have rated in the past have somehow lost their ratings. But I'll do a bit of work, try to remove the grey stars, and try to keep patient. Thanks for your help.

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Answer 7

Sep 14, 2016 8:49 AM in response to turingtest2

Lo and behold, scarcely a day after posting, Apple have produced iTunes 12.5. Manual star ratings are now in blue, and right-clicking on album view now removes automatic star ratings. Unfortunately, many of my manual ratings have randomly disappeared. If there is any risk behaviour continuing, I may have to "copy" my star ratings into the Comments field, which, as far as I can tell, is not randomly altered by Apple - do you have any information or experience on that?

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Answer 8

turingtest2

Level 10

276,725 points

Sep 14, 2016 11:30 AM in response to Neville Goodman1

So manual black ratings are now blue, and automatic light grey ratings are now a darker grey. Argh! 😮

I don't think the auto rating logic has actually changed in iTunes 12.5.1, though I'm still struggling to work out how to update a track rating on my iPhone with iOS 10. 😕

tt2

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Answer 9

Sep 15, 2016 1:20 AM in response to turingtest2

I had an idea of how to re-instate my star ratings, by getting them from Time Machine. But I discovered that the file <iTunes Music Library.xml> which holds track information is not recorded by Time Machine. (I wondered if that was because it is held in iCloud?) However, as I don't trust having just one backup, I also keep backup clones of my hard drive. Looking back at the <iTunes Music Library.xml> on that, lo and behold my old ratings can be found by searching for (for 5*) <key>Rating</key><integer>100</integer>. This also provides proof positive that iTunes does change ratings without user input, because tracks that are 5* in the old file do not necessarily have that rating in the current file. I shall make very sure that I keep a separate record of highly rated tracks in the future. I don't intend to have to go through all this again!