iTunes ratings: why?

[mmcirvin]

Apple'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.

Comments

How can it be made useful?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Having said that, I can think of ways that the feature could be made useful.

Star ratings like these, especially considering how labor-intensive they are, are really only useful for conveying some vague sense of your tastes to another entity (human, corporate, or machine).

So they might be useful in connection with one of those you-might-like-this-too databases. I can see Apple tying something like this into the iTunes Music Store: upload your star rankings to the Store and it starts suggesting stuff you might want to check out. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that they're working on this already.

But to make it easier, I suggest that they have a button that somehow translates your current play counts into star rankings, to get you started. This ought to be possible for somebody else to implement with an AppleScript, actually.

Re: How can it be made useful?

[astrange.livejournal.com]

tell application "iTunes"
set mainPlaylist to playlist "Library"
repeat with aTrack in tracks of mainPlaylist
set trackRating to played count of aTrack
if (trackRating > 100) then set trackRating to 100
set rating of aTrack to trackRating
end repeat
end tell

Probably won't work well for people who have been playing iTunes more than I have.