Filed under: Terminal Tips
Terminal Tip: Enable half-star ratings in iTunes
Do you like giving ratings to songs in iTunes? If so, then you've probably noticed that you are only able to rate songs on a full-star basis, not enough granularity for some music fans... there's a longstanding AppleScript hack to enable half-stars, but now there's an easier way around this issue. Macworld's Rob Griffiths found a work around, involving a simple Terminal tip to enable half-star ratings. To enable half-star ratings, close iTunes, and open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities). Once you have Terminal opened, type the following command and press enter:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
kieran12@gmail.com said 11:19AM on 12-31-2008
If you reset it back to false what happens to your ratings? Do you still have half stars you've already set or are they rounded up to a full star.
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Johnny said 11:23AM on 12-31-2008
This trick turns on or off the ability to create half stars, the ability to see them is always there. A few years back, I used a utility that automatically rated all the tracks in my library based on the number of times I've listened to them. It put half stars all over the place without my having the ability to create them myself.
Robert Vittori said 11:21AM on 12-31-2008
This did not work at all. I'm running the latest leopard and latest iTunes. I closed ITunes before I ran the command.
Did you test this?
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Brendan said 11:38AM on 12-31-2008
It works totally fine for me on latest Leopard with latest iTunes.
Doyle said 11:22AM on 12-31-2008
The app I Love Stars allows for half-star ratings right from the install
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kieran12@gmail.com said 11:23AM on 12-31-2008
you need to click in between two stars to do a half rating. In between the end of one and the start of the next. The whitespace in between.
Hope that helps
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jay said 3:22PM on 1-01-2009
You don't actually have to click between the stars. If you click on any star and drag across them, it will hit the half somewhere between the centers of the two stars.
To the author: Thanks a ton! Great tip.
Johnny said 11:27AM on 12-31-2008
I found the easiest way to be dragging through the stars. To give 3-1/2 stars, you could click 3 and drag slightly to the right or click 4 and drag slightly to the left.
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serenity said 11:41AM on 12-31-2008
YEEES! THANK YOU! I've used half stars a lot with an ugly applescript I access via the script menu. This is far, far superior!
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kieran12@gmail.com said 11:42AM on 12-31-2008
Does anybody know if the half stars will show up on an iPod or iPhone?
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Galley said 12:08PM on 12-31-2008
No, they will not.
marcoiac said 12:12PM on 12-31-2008
The half star does not show on my 1st gen iPhone. I wonder if the same terminal tip works on the iphone
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Mystic said 12:28PM on 12-31-2008
I HATE 1/2 star and tenths rating systems. I think 1-5 is the maximum a rating system should have. 1-4 being even better. Seriously, I would like to meet the person who can give reasons for rating one song a 6 and another an 8.
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mentalsticks said 1:12PM on 12-31-2008
You *are* aware that a "6" rating vs. an "8" rating is identical to a "3" rating vs. a "4" rating?
And even if you'd compare "6" with "7" which is what you probably mean, let me tell you that to me it happens often enough that I like a particular song more than the songs that I gave a 3 star rating but less than those that i rated 4 stars. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't make it useless, you know.
Stephen Lang said 2:44PM on 12-31-2008
Through elaborate Applescripts, kext-stuff and Terminal wizardry, my iTunes rating system goes up to 11.
mentalsticks said 3:46PM on 12-31-2008
11 is ridiculous. nobody needs that.
m said 3:03PM on 1-01-2009
you might as well as why schools grade out of 100. for starters, it's easier for most people to think in 10 levels--we're trained to, again, from our earliest days at school.
i definitely like it. 5 isn't enough, especially since no stars effectively
equals "songs i just haven't gotten around to rating yet," and not "i
hate it."
Jay said 3:27PM on 1-01-2009
In my case, I'm not trying to use this to make a 10 point system, but the 6 point system that I've used for years: 0 to 5 stars.
When the infectious album ratings came about, many of my zero-star songs had acquired an unintended star or several. One star, though, had not been my "worst" songs but my "rarely, but sometimes" songs while zero was for songs that I had not rated, or did not want to include in my usual rotation, but didn't want to remove from their parent complete albums either.
Being able to rate those songs 1/2 star will keep them from being automatically given the 2 or 3 star rating of their parent album and messing up my smart playlists, while keeping them below my 1 star songs and saving me from having to reinvent my whole system.
ZeroCorpse said 1:30PM on 12-31-2008
So this effectively turns iTunes into a 10-star rating system, instead of a 5-star rating system.
Bad idea, if you ask me.
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Brendan said 3:13PM on 12-31-2008
So don't enable it?