Half-star ratings in iTunes

[steuard]

I make heavy use of Smart Playlists in iTunes, many of them based to some degree on my rating for each song. I've also started to use the hidden ability of iTunes to show half-star ratings (I use an AppleScript to set those). But it turns out that iTunes gets confused if you put those two things together. In particular, it's not very good at math: it doesn't think that "2.5" is greater than "2".

So I recently broke down and dug into the internals of the Smart Playlist XML file format and created some playlists by hand that will identify songs whose ratings are not perfect integer numbers of stars. You can find them on my website: Half-star ratings in iTunes Smart Playlists. (I've got some notes there about how Party Shuffle works, too.) As usual, my explanation is far too long and wordy, but I've tried to make it easy to find the files themselves. (I know that there are at least a half-dozen people in the world who have been frustrated by the same issue. Well, close to a half-dozen, anyway.) If you've ever wondered how to make this work, have a look.

Comments

[kirin]

That's pretty darned nifty. I'll have to read your detailed article later when I have more time.

Unfortunately, I don't think it will be of much practical help to me. Although I do *heavily* rely on star-ratings to make playlists (including assigning my own special meanings to zero and one stars), I do 99% of my star-rating on the iPod. So unless someone hacks a way to assign half-stars using the iPod interface (which I'm sure is considerably more difficult, as you'd have to re-write iPod software and get it loaded rather than just using AppleScripts) I don't have any good way to use them. I just never have time to do rating stuff while sitting in front of the computer when I can do it on the go instead.

The weighted party shuffle is also pretty cool though, just because I hadn't noticed that option. (I'm not sure it existed when I first started using iTunes.)

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if limitations on the iPod were why the half-stars in iTunes aren't exposed in the UI, actually. I'll bet someone's working on it, but I'll bet that it's not easy to do (incrementally).

As for the weighted party shuffle feature, I like it a lot (even though it's not that big of an effect in the end: I actually augment it a little with the playlists I most often use). I just recently noticed that I had the same option when loading songs onto my iPod Shuffle (I don't know whether that's special to the Shuffle, though).

[kirin]

Well, I don't see why it would be hard for *Apple* to do... currently you can use the thumb wheel to set zero to five stars in sequence, you could just add in half-stars to the sequence. I suppose it might be a little fidgety to get the precise rating with 11 options instead of six, but it doesn't seem that bad.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I was imagining that perhaps the iPod only stores an integer number of stars internally rather than the 0-100 scores used internally by iTunes. But that would be pretty ridiculous now that I think of it: 3 bits vs. 8 bits per song is not an argument for writing a complicated conversion routine from one device to the other.

So yeah, I have no idea why Apple hasn't opted to support this feature for real. Mysteries of the universe, I guess.