My Foolhardy Effort to Rate Every Song in my iTunes Library
July 31st, 2008, 14 Comments »
I take an embarrassing amount of pleasure in pruning, tweaking and annotating my iTunes library. It’s strangely important to me that all of my songs display the right meta-data for song title, artist, album and so forth.
One of my long term goals is to rate every song I own. At the moment I’ve got 8487 songs in my library, and I’ve only rated 2856 of them.
So, most of the time, I have iTunes playing a particular ’smart’ playlist through Party Shuffle. The playlist looks like this:
When I remember, I alt+tab over to iTunes and rate the currently playing song. I play it through Party Shuffle because, otherwise, when I rate a song in my ‘Unrated’ playlist, it instantly stops playing and disappears from the playlist (it is, after all, only obeying the rules).
My rating system is largely ad hoc, and works like this:
1 star = Awful, and I usually delete these.
2 stars = Not great, but I want to keep it because I have the whole album. Also, it could be a specialty song, like a Christmas song or a novelty track.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = I like it, and would be happy to hear it once or twice a week.
5 stars = Songs for the ages. If this song was playing on my iPod when I was killed by a bus, that’d be okay.
Do you rate songs in iTunes?
