AutoRate: iTunes rating done right
I don't know about you, but ratings are one of those iTunes features that I'd like to use but never seem to find the time. Rating each song individually is such a drag, and I'm a busy, powerful, and influential blogger. I don't have that kind of time. Luckily for busy iTuners everywhere AutoRate is there to help. As you might have gathered from the name, this little application automatically rates your iTunes tracks (you can specify a playlist, or have it do your whole library) using this formula:
rating = (100 * ( (play frequency - lower) / (upper - lower) ) - skips per month * 5
I ran it against my iTunes library of 7161 items. The whole process took less than 10 minutes on my MacBook, and the results were spot on.
AutoRate is free.
[via Download Squad]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
andrew harrison said 9:08PM on 5-22-2007
I just rate songs 5 stars if i want to listen to it as a single [eg: on shuffle], and 0 stars if i don't.
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Sovok said 9:25PM on 5-22-2007
And i assign new songs 3 stars and just rate them up or down, if they stick out.
If you assign keyboard shortcuts for ratings in Quicksilver or some other iTunes control program, it's even faster. Ctrl+Option+Command+4 -> 4 star rating etc.
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Jason Martin said 9:51PM on 5-22-2007
This is a great idea. However, it depends on your listening habits being firmly established in iTunes. Most of my unrated music I either have not listened to at all yet or I've only listened to a handful of times. I ran this utility on just my unrated music. It rated only 39 out of 342 songs because most of the songs that are unrated have no play/skip frequency data.
BTW, it used 1/2 star ratings. How can I do that? I've only seen whole star ratings?
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Jeremy said 10:22PM on 5-22-2007
iTunes rates songs from 2 through 10.
If you select a song, copy, and paste it into a text editor, you'll see all the info shown in iTunes in the same order. Ratings are always your rating times 2.
I feel guilty giving songs by my favorite artists/bands a low rating.
I try to rate all my songs, though.
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Rogeriogal said 11:09PM on 5-22-2007
Use the Applescript Utility with the Apple iTunes Scripts and use this "Assign half-star rating" script. I have been doing it a long time and it works.
Beware, the songs in an iPod will not show 1/2 star ratings, so messing with the ratings outside of iTunes will delete the half value. Another drawback is that you have to go to iTunes (even when it's h) to apply the 1/2 ratings to songs.
Hint: use the AppleScript Utility.app to set "Show application scrips at: top" to reduce pointer distance between clicks, thus incrementing productivity.
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Rogeriogal said 11:10PM on 5-22-2007
http://www.apple.com/applescript/itunes/original_index.html
iTunes Scripts
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts09.php?page=2#assignhalfstar
Assign half-star Script
!@#$%^&*
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Macskeeball said 11:15PM on 5-22-2007
I used to be more elaborate in my ratings, but now I simply assign a one star rating if I'm considering deleting the song (or if it skips, etc.). Other than that, I keep my songs unrated. I then have a smart playlist that acts as a queue of songs to review for possible deletion/restoration. I may not be able to delete songs using my iPod, but I can certainly rate them.
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Rogeriogal said 11:19PM on 5-22-2007
I wish the Autorate would work on an iPod, the iTunes is only the bridge with a limit of 10GB. I agree most tunes are not played enough to be rated.
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inaequitas said 11:36PM on 5-22-2007
Unfortunately disregarding my current ratings doesn't sound that great. I had to recently restore an awkwardly corrupt iTunes library [the XML was fine but the binary portion wasn't] and the play count was gone on re-import - but not the rating.
For those of you that want to grab statistics from your iPods, there's an application called "Synch iPod-iTunes Data" that does a pretty good job of mixing and matching data from the two.
One of these days I'll take a peek at the source for Auto-Rate and try to come up with a decent formula for saving existing ratings.
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Alexander said 11:51PM on 5-22-2007
I really wish iTunes would count songs that play for more than a minute or two as songs played and NOT skipped songs...it's like the one really good thing that the Zune does with is player software.
Otherwise, I can't rate on this basis because there are some songs I absolutely love, but I may not want to listen all the way through or may not usually be in the mood for.
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Ahmad said 12:31AM on 5-23-2007
#10 has the same complaint that I do. that's mainly why I haven't downloaded this app. (even though I came across it a while ago while browsing macupdate)
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Steve said 1:35AM on 5-23-2007
I agree with #1
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mars said 4:37AM on 5-23-2007
This program sucks, It rated about 1/5 of my library at 5 stars, gave another 1/5 of my library half stars and left the rest blank. Something is fundamentally wrong with the formula it uses.
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mars said 4:39AM on 5-23-2007
Oh, and I REALLY agree with #10, it is one of my biggest pet peeves, since I rarely listen to the whole track, I'm a fidgety listener.
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Ben Collins said 5:33AM on 5-23-2007
Yeah, I agree with everyone that agrees with #10.... Something like the way Last.fm Counts plays would be much better (i think its half the track or 2min40sec, whichever comes first, right?)
I found the ratings i got from this thing were REALLY weird.
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Joe said 9:53AM on 5-23-2007
This tip should be accompanied by another tip that shows you how to backup the library file (not all the songs, just the library) so that if you don't like the way this worked out, you could swap out the new library with the saved one.
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Bibulb said 11:02AM on 5-23-2007
For #16, the best thing I could recommend is simply to duplicate the library file in the Finder beforehand. (I've taken to doing this every day or so anyway just because any time iTunes has crashed lately, it's killed my library file.)
On that note, anyone know of a way to resurrect the binary library file? (And/or to put stuff like ratings, play count et al into each file as ID3 tags rather than in the monolithic library file?)
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ThunkDifferent.com said 11:48AM on 5-23-2007
Will AutoRate, auto listen for you too? It seems that web users are getting more comfortable with automation & so where is the fun there days? Any way, go to hear if you are interested in selecting your own music and listening to it.
http://Savenetradio.org
http://ThunkDifferent.com
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Justin Hiltz said 3:55PM on 5-24-2007
I wasn't going to open my mouth until I tried Autorate myself. It was EXACTLY the program I was looking for. That is until I finally let it run through my 8,000+ unrated songs. The algorithm I believe would work great for someone with a new library who was listening to each album a few times as they get imported. My unrated tracks (like others here) are generally songs that have 0 or 1 play through, and not a single skip anywhere in sight.
I think this application has potential but I feel it needs to truly analyze your library. It should take into account how you rate songs based on how you've rated music by similar artists, music in the same genre, etc. Then it should take the algorithm it already has and maybe the combo would produce fair results for everybody. I'm not even sure it's possible, but one can dream.
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inaequitas said 8:41PM on 5-25-2007
@Bibulb - #17: Backups are about the only way I know of to save your play-count. Ratings are saved: http://hackd.net/2007/04/17/case-of-the-missing-files/
but the only way I can think of getting back your play-count is by way of another apple script that will read the XML you have and assign ratings one by one.
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