Rating your music in iTunes¶

I'm down to rating the last 15 songs (out of 3112). Just at that moment Tim Bray starts a series about his 5-star rated music . Nice idea, it'll be interesting to see what his 5-star collection is :-)

Since about four months or so I've created an "unrated" playlist in iTunes and I've been methodically going through them. The number 1 good thing: I get a lot more variation in my listening. Normally you pop a CD in the CD player and listen the entire thing. This tends to restrict itself to the top 20% of good CDs most of the time. Now I can just get a random list of good songs, irregardless of the quality of the CD as a whole.

I've got two playlists where I use the rating feature most. These are also the prominent lists I use to fill my ipod shuffle with, for during commuting (with good isolating headphones, bloody expensive but worth every penny in filtering out mobile phone noise).

Non-junk

Everything rated 2 starts and above. I don't want the junk I haven't yet thrown away, but I don't mind a not-that-good-but-ok song now and then. Higher rated songs are played more often, so that's fine.

Four and five stars

Just the really good stuff.

To me, 1 star is junk, 2 stars is not that good, but passable. 3 is just good music. 4 stars is for the really good stuff. 5 stars is for some of Bach's big organ pieces, Genesis' "Supper 's ready" and so.