iTunes ratings: why?
Jul. 5th, 2003 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinApple's iTunes and iPod have a "rating" system whereby you can give songs ratings of 1 to 5 stars. You can set the ratings at any time while listening to music, even on the go with the iPod.
It's useless, as far as I can tell.
It seems like it ought to be useful, but it's not. The TiVo has a similar "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" rating feature for video, but that's useful even though it is similarly imprecise, because the TiVo uses it to guess what you might like and pick suggestions out of the aether for you. You hardly need any information for that besides "I like this/I don't like this".
In iTunes/iPod, there's no such payoff; the only thing you can really do with the ratings is use them to search and sort things. And for those purposes, five levels is just too coarse a granularity, if you've got a music collection that contains thousands of songs. The like/don't like distinction is better served by playlists and the "active track" check box. Besides, how am I going to say whether I like "Where Your Eyes Don't Go" more or less than "The Gum Suckers March"?
I find that a much more useful metric of which songs are my favorites is the most obvious one: the play count. Sorting a playlist by play count, most-played first, yields instant comfort music. Sorting it in the other direction gives you stuff you haven't listened to much, or at all, which can be interesting as well. While listening to music straight through, you vote every time you give a song the gong or listen to it all the way through.
It's useless, as far as I can tell.
It seems like it ought to be useful, but it's not. The TiVo has a similar "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" rating feature for video, but that's useful even though it is similarly imprecise, because the TiVo uses it to guess what you might like and pick suggestions out of the aether for you. You hardly need any information for that besides "I like this/I don't like this".
In iTunes/iPod, there's no such payoff; the only thing you can really do with the ratings is use them to search and sort things. And for those purposes, five levels is just too coarse a granularity, if you've got a music collection that contains thousands of songs. The like/don't like distinction is better served by playlists and the "active track" check box. Besides, how am I going to say whether I like "Where Your Eyes Don't Go" more or less than "The Gum Suckers March"?
I find that a much more useful metric of which songs are my favorites is the most obvious one: the play count. Sorting a playlist by play count, most-played first, yields instant comfort music. Sorting it in the other direction gives you stuff you haven't listened to much, or at all, which can be interesting as well. While listening to music straight through, you vote every time you give a song the gong or listen to it all the way through.