I’ve been working on rating all my digital music recently (still a long way to go). Pretty easy in iTunes:
- Create a live updating smart playlist that contains all your unrated songs.
- Rate them as you listen (even easier with global keyboard shortcuts from Synergy).
Only one problem, when you rate a song it is immediately removed from the smart playlist and the playback stops.
The solution? Set your “Unrated” playlist as the source for Party Shuffle then the songs stay in the queue and keep playing – it’s that easy (and unintuitive). Thanks to Geof for showing me this one.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
Yeah, with this, you can mow through stuff reaaaaaaaaaaaaaally fast.
April 5th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Chris Pederick adds this Comment:
Ah – great tip about the Party Shuffle.
I used to use the Unrated playlist on my iPod because there the playlist does not update immediately.
April 5th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
Bryan adds this Comment:
Thanks Alex (and Geof)! That tip totally rocks!
April 5th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Jeff Wheeler adds this Comment:
I’ve done this before, however, the problem is that I get distracted so easily and completely forget that music is playing. I will skip rating them after about ten minutes.
April 9th, 2005 at 6:40 am
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
But the beauty of doing it inside Party Shuffle is that you can rate whenever the mood strikes; running off of an “Unrated Songs” playlist means that you get one pass through before iTunes stops.
April 9th, 2005 at 9:52 am
jason@redwooddesign.com adds this Comment:
find other ways to play and sort music. having tmanually rate them makes no sense since you are going to play what you want to play anyways. At least thats my 2 cents. i can understand it if it some sort of community situation, but for personal means, my preferences change weekly, why rate?
April 11th, 2005 at 12:38 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Actually, I normally put everything on shuffle so by rating them I can have the songs I like play more frequently. Tools like Goombah will also mine this data for community recommendations.
April 11th, 2005 at 7:11 am
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
And I don’t know if Alex does this, but I re-rate songs as time goes by…
April 11th, 2005 at 8:38 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Not so much yet, I’m still going through 2000+ in the Unrated playlist.
April 11th, 2005 at 8:42 am
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
Yeesh!
April 11th, 2005 at 9:08 am
Lander adds this Comment:
I had a similar problem when I migrated from WMP to iTunes and all my song ratings were left in WMP. I wrote a small program to import the ratings and play counts from WMP into iTunes. You can download the program from http://wmp2itunes.blogspot.com/
June 15th, 2006 at 3:50 am
Josh adds this Comment:
How is this different from just turning off live updating? When I try this tip, the Party Shuffle list doesn’t move to the next song after I rate one. I still have to manually move ahead, just like when I used my Unrated playlist with “live updating” turned off. (v7.5)
I has borken Itunz?
November 30th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Michael Paul adds this Comment:
@Josh: Turning off live updating will in fact get you the same results, but we efficiency freaks are looking for a playlist that only has songs with rating = 0. Thus, say we happen to fall asleep at the wheel and not rate 10 songs, then get back on the bandwagon and rate 5 or 10, only to fall asleep again and miss another 5. You can see that, if we were to go back and rate the unrated songs, the easiest way is to edit the playlist, click the “live updating”, press OK to refresh the list, then edit the playlist again and untick the “live updating” checkbox. It’s much simpler to just create a smart playlist with rating = 0 and live updating turned on, and then set that playlist as the source of your party shuffle. Now… if you wanted to rate songs one by one off of an album from a particular artists, you’re SOL. I think this is for the ADD-prone peeps who just want to ram through their library at random and rate everything.
And for that I say, “thanks for the hot tip!”
July 25th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Dennis "Best Songs" James adds this Comment:
But don’t you have to scroll through every single song in your library? Seems like initially it would take a long time.
August 16th, 2008 at 4:55 pm