iTunes Re-Rating
My new music workflow is pretty simple: put the CD through the Great CD Preservation Project meatgrinder at home, rip again at the office [but only because I can rip faster than I can upload-download], listen at work.
I have two iTunes smart playlists designed for new music: Recently Added [any song imported into iTunes in the last seven days] and Top Songs of the Last Month [four- and five-star songs imported in the last month]. I use a third smart playlist, Unrated Songs, to let me quickly rate new stuff.
What I’m finding, though, is that I’m sometimes … overly enthusiastic with ratings. Stuff that gets a five-star rating really only deserves a four, and stuff that deserves a three might get a four. Now, this over-rating on my part usually occurs when I’m in a good mood and/or really like the artist—especially if I’m new to them!—and want to really like the music. Four- and five-star rating can end up being a habit, and … then I end up with skewed results.
Ideally, this is what I’m going for in terms of what the ratings indicate:
- Five stars: OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS SONG PLAY IT OVER AND OVER!!!
- Four stars: This song is really good. I could listen to it pretty regularly.
- Three stars: This song is good.
- Two stars: Ehhhh … skip.
- One star: Never play this song again!
[Yeah, I end up un-checking one-starred songs so I never hear them again.]
An example: “Dry Lightning” from Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. It’s a nice song, but in my book … not five stars. I rated it as such, though.
I’m wondering what strategies make sense for managing this better. [If you're saying to yourself, "Geof, you're overthinking this! This crap doesn't matter!" ... thanks. Now, go look at something else.] If you’ve got ideas, I’d like to hear them … somehow, re-rating my fours and fives doesn’t seem like a simple process.
Yeah, that sounds about like how my rating system has wound up. And I have about the same problem, also: too many fours and fives that really should be threes and fours. I suppose in an ideal world, you would have a good bell curve, mostly 3-star songs. I tend to reseve the 1-star rating for talking tracks and things like that, though; if I really don’t like the song it generally never makes it into my library in the first place.
October 25th, 2005 at 6:31 pmI think that one problem is that there’s not enough resolution in the ratings iTunes gives you. Would it help if you could rate out of ten? You could do this somehow by making use of the ‘grouping’ field, or possibly the ‘comments’ field. Say, a five-star song with a comment of “half” would actually be a “nine-star” song, and a five-star song with no comment would be a “ten-star” song. That’s probably too much work for anybody who’s not incredibly anal about their ratings.
Or maybe come to the realization that ratings don’t have to be static and are a reflection of your feelings towards the song the last time you listened to it.
Here I go off into the “it can’t be done” domain… if you were fluid with your ratings and rated songs each time they were played (or didn’t rate them, meaning your opinion of the song hasn’t changed), you could come up with some kind of an average rating per play that’d probably more accurately rate the song.
October 25th, 2005 at 6:37 pmBrad: I love the idea of continuous re-rating. This would be much, much simpler if there were keystrokes for it … let me alt-tab into iTunes, hit a keystroke to rate the song, and alt-tab back. If I can make the entire interaction last under two seconds, I’ll do it. If not … feh. Having to change windows, mouse over, and then click … not fast. Not likely.
As for a greater-than-five gradation: I just don’t see it being really very feasible. I have a hard enough time with just five ratings levels: ten would just be obfuscatory. Look at how IMDB ratings happen: you see lots above 7 and below 3, but 4-6 get hosed. And while maybe this argues that six or seven levels might work, well … we’re base 10 creatures.
Keith: The curve is far more likely to be a binomial distribution skewed to the right. This would put the peak around 3.5 or so, likely; from there, you’d drop down to the integer levels. I can’t give you what those intervals would be, but it would probably be likely to be close to the distribution I have now. Maybe I should crack open a prob & stats text…
October 25th, 2005 at 11:58 pmI think the 5-star system is just right. Adding resolution to the ratings just complicates things. Here’s how I manage my music in iTunes:
Generally, as soon as I rip a batch of CDs (I don’t use iTunes itself, I use Easy CD-DA Extractor), I import the songs into my iTunes Library. Then I set the rating for all the new songs to 3. This is my baseline rating. As you suggested, anything below that is something I probably don’t want to hear much, and above that is something that stands out as great.
My main playlist is called “The Good Mix”, and it pulls from 5 other playlists:
Least Often Played
75 songs, sorted by least often played, > 2 stars, not heard in the last 3 days.
Least Recently Played
50 songs, sorted by least recently played, > 2 stars.
Random
25 songs, selected randomly, > 1 star, not heard in the last 5 days.
Best Of
30 songs, selected randomly, > 3 stars, not heard in the last 1 day.
Unrated
Self-explanatory. Just to catch songs that I forgot to rate.
This gives me a good mix of my favorites, along with a small dose of songs that I might not normally go out of my way to hear. It also lets me hear more recent additions more frequently, because, well, they’re new, and I want to hear them, right? By setting the “not heard in the last X days”, I keep from overdosing on my favorites too badly, or hearing the less popular songs too often.
October 26th, 2005 at 9:31 amA quite interesting concept, Dougal. I’m going to give that a try … I just built them all.
October 26th, 2005 at 11:03 amMy rating system is simillar.
I’ve also got a heirarchy of playlists. (Partially out of necessity, and partially for convenience) For one, my iShuffle will only hold 125 songs.
So I have a “Top Shelf” playlist of the top 10% my 4 and 5 star songs (most played) This is about 250 tracks.
My “Shuffle” list is an abbreviated list, for 125 tracks.
I have other playlists to capture my “underrated” “underplayed” “not rated” or “not played” tracks. That way my iTunes and my iPod have all the songs in easy reach.
My co-workers say I’m too analytical in my musical organization.
October 26th, 2005 at 11:42 amGeof: You need to find some kind of plugin or something that’ll allow you to rate songs without switching into iTunes. I don’t know if you’re on a Mac or a PC (I’m guessing PC from the “alt-tab” reference), but on the Mac I use Synergy. CMD-F4 to lower a rating, CMD-F5 to raise it. I don’t know if such things exist for Windows though….
October 26th, 2005 at 2:44 pmBrad: Yes, I’d love something like that. I’ll have to go a-Googling, as I’m a PC user at the office [and for now at home, although that's soon to change].
October 26th, 2005 at 2:51 pmBTW, in my setup, you can adjust the balance pretty easily by changing the maximum songs in those sub-playlists. In my case, I haven’t ripped enough of my CD collection to my laptop yet (my library is only about 1650 songs at the moment). So if I weight it towards my favorites too much, I end up hearing the same songs too frequently. That’s why my setup is balanced to bring up more of the least frequent/recent songs.
That’s probably pretty obvious, but I thought I’d point it out.
On another note, 125 CDs worth of music sounds like a lot until you realize that only about 1 out of every 10 songs is good enough to get a 4 or 5 star rating. I need to dig the rest of our CDs out of the basement. Maybe after we get back to IKEA and buy some more media shelves for our family room…
October 27th, 2005 at 3:01 pm[...] I have been trying to do that rating system for awhile, but it is just too easy to give out a 4 or 5 star rating! I have to learn to be a little more objective in some of the songs I give those ratings to. [...]
October 30th, 2005 at 9:09 pmI use pretty much the same rating system for my tunes, additionally, I have a smart playlist called “Rate Me!” which shows the last 25 songs that have played that aren’t rated. Its a good way to catch up with ratings while keeping Party Shuffle on.
October 31st, 2005 at 3:53 pmI’m gonna give it a try as well. Geof, did you ever find a plug in to allow you to rate tracks w/o having to bring iTunes into focus? Pass it on if you find one… I’ll do the same.
November 1st, 2005 at 4:15 pm[...] While browsing the net I came across ijsm.org and a slightly interesting article about rating songs in iTunes. But then, while browsing through the comments, a user posted his iTunes setup and it dawned on me that I really have not been using iTunes to its full potential. So without further ado, here is the setup (credit for the idea goes to Dougal Campbell) which I am currently using now: I created a playlist called “The Good Mix,” which is limited to 2GB in size, and pulls songs randomly from the following five smart playlists: [...]
November 1st, 2005 at 5:15 pmIf you never want to hear a song again, wouldn’t it be better to just delete it anyway? For me, a 2-star rating is for songs I want to relisten to, and rerate for later. 1-star ratings are songs I’ll be nuking when I sync at home.
I wish nested playlists updated dynamically…
November 4th, 2005 at 4:56 amHow and Why I Use Last.FM
At the behest of David Thompson, I’m writing this entry on how and why I use Last.FM.
How I Use Last.FM
The how I use it comes down to a few mechanical things:
I use the various iTunes plugins—the Windows version on my office PC, and …
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:52 pmVery cool! I should have caught this months ago. It’s given me some good ideas for constructing my own iTunes playlists…
January 4th, 2006 at 11:15 amMy iTunes Smart Playlists
I’m going to take a brief respite from rattling off my 2006 New Year’s Resolutions to kick off my Best Practices category with an entry about the iTunes Smart Playlists I use while seeding Last.FM with data. This is based largely on the p…
January 4th, 2006 at 2:32 pmRevisiting Tom Brosseau
On Sunday, I wrote the following:
April 26th, 2006 at 12:13 pmTom Brosseau’s What I Mean to Say Is Goodbye. Brosseau has a high, reedy sound to his voice. It’s a sound that takes a bit of getting used to, but I like it, on the whole. I know that this is a re-issue of an early…
I baseline all my music at 2 stars, not 3 — I don’t really need a lot of resolution regarding how much I don’t like a song, but I do want the extra resolution for stuff I do like. 1 star is reserved for stuff that I just don’t want to hear.
I definitely don’t delete songs just because I don’t like them. My tastes change, other people visit, sometimes it’s useful to hear the complete album, etc.
Good thoughts from everyone about smart playlist ideas.
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:52 amReally Re-Rating
I had the most “duh, why didn’t I think of that?!” comment to my iTunes Re-Rating entry the other day:
June 7th, 2006 at 12:24 pmI baseline all my music at 2 stars, not 3 — I don’t really need a lot of resolution regarding how much I don’t like a song, b…
You can make the star rating system into a 10 star system instead of a 5 star system (i.e. increase the resolution of the rating system) by taking advantage of half stars (like 3 and 1/2, etc.)
Check it out.
July 21st, 2006 at 4:21 amhttp://andrewescobar.com/archive/2006/02/04/half-star-ratings-in-itunes/
While iTunes does have rudimentary support for half-stars, you can’t use that to do anything useful. If you rate a track as three and a half stars and have a Smart Playlist that lists all tracks with ratings higher than three stars, that three and a half star track won’t show up, only four and five star (and possibly four and a half star) tracks will.
And you can’t create a Smart Playlist using half-star ratings either, so if you just want all of your tracks rated three and a half stars, you’re out of luck, unless you make a manual playlist.
Until Apple fully supports half-star ratings, I wouldn’t bother.
Oh, and the easiest way to use half-star ratings isn’t really through the applescripts linked above. I’d say easiest is to use Star, which not only allows for half-star ratings, but it also has Growl support so you can be alerted when iTunes plays songs that are unrated.
July 21st, 2006 at 2:26 pmWell, but I don’t find a terrible amount of utility in half-stars. I mean, there’s no functional difference in 3.5 stars out of 5.0 and 7.0 stars out of 10.0. How much resolution do we really need? I think that Apple got it right: five is enough to do the job.
I’ve had the suggestion, which I’ve implemented, that one can define average as two, which gives you two resolution points for good—3 & 4—and one for great. Your resolution points for bad are 1 & unchecked. That’s working out for me, and even now, I’m finding it hard to do much difference between 3 & 4. I really only need five data points, really, which tells me that I could probably use 3 as average and be okay.
I only made the switch two average=2 because I tend not to purchase and keep music that I’m not going to like, so my star distribution is going to be a right-skewed bell curve if average=3. I’m essentially monkeying with the data and playing a mind game with myself to fit my data to a curve, which is probably a bad idea.
July 21st, 2006 at 4:08 pm[...] The Background: It took some time, and about fifty revisions, but I feel like I have finally figured out an efficient and practical use for iTunes SmartPlaylists. The whole process started a few months back with a post by Geof F. Morris and some comments by Dougal Campbell, which I had documented and revised a bit in this post. The initial idea was (or still is) great, but after many moons of fiddling, I realized that the implementation was simply wrong (for me). No matter what I did, I could not get the playlist to work in the way that I imagined it would. I would frequently duplicate songs, unchanging playlists, and a lot of songs that I did not like to show up in my playlists. It took awhile, but I eventually realized that it was not the playlist structure that was flawed, but that my database of songs (8,000+) was simply too large for that playlist structure. So, I set out to think of a different playlist structure. [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 11:55 pmChristopher Allen on 5-Star Rating Systems…
Christopher Allen shot me an email the other day pointing to his work on practical applications of 5-star rating systems. I found it to be an interesting read, which you might expect given my previous commentary on the subject. Highlights:
August 12th, 2006 at 7:26 pmThus even …
For what it’s worth since this is an old thread, what’s so difficult with re-rating? I agree that I often get over excited about a song and rate it hgher than it deserves in the long run, but it’s easy to rate on the go with the iPod! It’s actually a fun process. To paraphrase an earlier post, why do ratings have to be static. To me, it’s a fun process and enjoy the constant fine-tuning my music organization goes through!
September 29th, 2007 at 3:40 pmGerry: Yeah, I regularly end up re-rating as well.
September 29th, 2007 at 6:55 pmSeeing as everyone is talking about their playlist setup, I’ll give mine up too.
I used to be a Windows Media Player fan, and was in above my head when I couldn’t browse songs by their star rating. After getting used to iTunes’ system I made 5 smart playlists, set to constantly update;
1 Stars
2 Stars
3 Stars
4 Stars
5 Stars
Yes, I named it “1 Stars”- I couldn’t bear for it to look different from the other categories by missing the “s”!
I then made a playlist called “Unrated”, later renaming this to “0 Stars” so that it would be the first playlist on my list.
I then made two playlists; “Albums/Singles” and “Freebies” to differentiate between the rubbish free CD’s you get in the newspapers.
And, just for fun, a “100 all time classics” playlist so that I could have a neat little place with all of my absolute favorite songs.
Anyway, in answer to your article- I used to beg for a ten star rating system, but I figure now that ten stars would take up too much width of my monitor! Besides, I’d only end up with the same problem. After all, what makes a song a 6 and not a 7?
March 29th, 2008 at 10:28 am