Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iPod How many songs have you rated? (For OCDs only.)

kavika411

kavika411

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 8, 2006
617
3
Alabama
If you have obsessive compulsive tendencies, perhaps you dream of the day when you have rated every song in your library. I am curious whether anyone else is consumed with rating songs (actually rating song by song by song, and not block rating). How many have you rated?

I have rated just over 2,000 and would like to rate the remaing 7,500 in my library.
 
All of my 3,226 tracks are rated. :eek:

The main reason is because my personal playlist is a smart playlist which sucks in all two-star and higher rated tracks. I share my iTunes Library with Miss Jaffa Cake, and I'll just say that there's a lot of stuff she has that I don't want to find myself listening to – all her bad stuff has a one-star rating so it'll never get to pollute my ears.

If you just rate stuff as you import it, it's really not that much of a hassle. ;)
 
I have serious OCD issues when it comes to iTunes - re-naming all artists like "Nick Cave" to "Cave, Nick" for example, and including the record label in the album title, digging up composer and year details (putting the release year in the album title for retrospective compilations and the actual release year for each track in the year field) and hunting down or scanning in album covers - but i've never done any ratings at all.

Partly there's just too many to rate, partly i'm far too indecisive to settle on any particular rating for a song when it's so dependent on my mood at the time - i'd rate Oh You Pretty Things higher than Baby Don't Forget My Number as a vastly better song frinstance but the latter higher than the former as a cheesy dance classic, but mainly because iTunes doesn't store ratings in the tag, you lose them all if you have to re-import your library
 
Wow, Frankblundt. It seems I've started an AA meeting of sorts. My name is Kavika411, and I have an iTunes problem. Hello, Kavika411. :)

I am curious; you are obviously meticulous with your iTunes information. Do you take such precision with genres? I struggle with genres because of the way you can't cleanly assign multiple genres.
 
i pretty much ignore genres too, for much the same reasons. I have no ability or confidence in trusting myself to assign such abitrary and subjective judgement calls to songs - just the facts ma'am.

Ocassionally i use them (with whatever they come with by default from CDDB), like to just play Jazz when my parents come over, but that's about it. Even then it doesn't work all that well, because a lot of hip-hop is mysteriously lumped in that genre (same with R&B), and i can't bring myself to choose Easy Listening...

It's work enough getting the facts right anyway - is this the Australasian-only version of the cd single or the same as the UK release? .. do i include bonus disks under the same album name as disk 2 of 2 or call it a bonus disk which inflates the total number of albums falsely or rename the album title to include the fact that this is a special bonus disk edition... (I definitely have an iTunes problem :p )
 
My name is wPod, and I have an iTunes problem. (heh)

I am OCD over album art. The new iTunes 7.0 with the auto downloading of art. but with 1777 albums you cant just select all and tell iTunes to get album art. it just doesnt work, it doesnt get the art for some unknown reason, but if i go through and select single albums it usually grabs art work. anyway, i had 3 different music collections. 20GB i had listened to often and that was all that fit on my old iPod. 30 GB i listened to sometimes. and 5 GB i didnt really listen to much. well anyway, when the first 5th gen came out i wanted to be able to eventually get one and have all my album art. so i got the album art for my entire 20 GB collection (roughtly 1000 albums). that was quite a task cause that was all by hand, no iTunes to help. next was the 30 GB i attacked that with iTunes 7. and it took about 3 days (well a couple hours every night after work/classes) then i compiled all 3 collections into one (just got an 80GB iPod so it will all fit and have room to spare!) and the album art didnt transfer on everything!!! arg!!!! its killing me!

anyway. the point is, its such a pain to get the album art just right that there is no way i could go through roughtly 13500 songs and rate them all. i would like to. i think it would be cool to have smart playlists based off of how much i like each song. but honestly i like different songs in different moods! so a nice sunny day, then Jack Johnson is a 5 star and Slipknot is a 2. but then sunday night when i have a big report the next day Slipknot is a 5 and Jack Johnson is a -3 ! heh.
 
4588 songs rated. More sitting in the 2-3 category than I'd like. Not enough 5 star content. :eek:

2798 songs are unrated and haven't been played. i.e. songs in this playlist have to be rated and have a play-count of at least 1 to disappear off of the list. That way, I know I've listened to the song the whole way through and have more than likely set the rating to something which I find appropriate. :cool:

Most of it is live stuff that's been downloaded fairly recently, thats why the number is so large. The full playlist name is "Unrated & Not Played (Should Be Empty)" although I very much doubt it'll ever be empty. :D Far too lazy for that kind of thing, or maybe not obsessive enough? Nah. :p
 
Genres are absolutely essential, but there's the risk of assigning too many specific genres. I keep genres to around 20 or so, which makes it easier to select based on my mood. So, if I need to relax, I may just play Easy Listening, Classical and New Age genres and other times, I could select Rock and Pop and Alternative.

For star ratings, nope. I might give 5 and 4 stars to my most favourite songs, and 1 and 2 stars for songs that have technical errors or bad copies, or songs I just don't really like.
 
Jaffa Cake said:
The main reason is because my personal playlist is a smart playlist...
If you just rate stuff as you import it, it's really not that much of a hassle. ;)
Click to expand...

Agree - if you don't rate your songs - the smart lists won't play or rotate preferred songs - and doing it each time is just as effortless as setting the audio presets.

Doing after the fact with a large library would be a chore I feel
 
it took me 8 months loading the stuff in as it was, what with my anal re-naming schema and all. Adding rating pondering time just wasn't an option. And anyway, i just can't bring myself to rate stuff on a five star scale any more than i can write a report in PowerPoint - i need footnotes, qualifications, speculation, digressions and end notes demmit
[sigh] oh for for the halcyon days of the 18th century...
 
177 songs rated out of 10,803.

I just can't be arsed to rate songs, knowing full well most songs left unrated are just rated at a 3. I'll only rate songs 4-5 stars if they're really good or 1-2 stars if they're really bad.
 
Take a look at my Music Store "To Buy" playlist. :rolleyes: (picture posted below)

I have 662 songs I want to buy!

I have sorted 449 of the songs in the order I want to buy them!

I have put individual genres on over 450 of the songs!

I sort the top section of this list on a regular basis. I used to sort it all but then I got busy and now I have over 200 songs at the very bottom that occationally grows. If I find a really good song I sort it immediately after putting it in the list.

I also made a simple apple script that delays for 32 seconds before it plays the next store song automatically and then repeats. I hope this is OK with Apple. :D This Apple Script is the only program that I've ever made (if you can even call it a program.) :eek: If you want me to post it I can. ;)

146 Artists and 245 Albums -- Trust me -- you'll want to buy my top 25 songs that are visible on this image below. ;)

Take a look at my play counts on some of the songs. Pretty crazy for songs not purchased yet isn't it? :D :eek:

Now If you ever want information about my purchased songs -- just ask. :D ;)
 
mad jew said:
FWIW, I don't rate my songs for the same reason. I strip all data from them except their name and artist.
Click to expand...
At the minimum, I fill in the artist name, song title, and year of original recording, genre and album name (in the case I have all the songs from the album, plus track number info). Makes sorting and creating smart playlists easier.
 
I didnt want to rate all 23957 tracks after the first 1000 so i deleted the rating column. Simple
 
archurban said:
all of my songs (6554 songs) rated already. after buying album, or songs, I listen it for 1 minutes each song. then rated. I am very control freak.
Click to expand...

thats 109 HOURS of listening and rating! thats some serious dedication!
 
I have a playlist for my songs that haven't been rated or played yet. It's for songs that I recently imported. Otherwise, my 8,138 songs are rated (I rated them one by one after listening to them for at least 30 seconds)because most of my Smart Playlists are based on ratings in one way or another.
 
I use ratings a bit differentely than others. I've got about 7,200 songs in my library. I have about 1100 songs rated. I have a smart playlist called "Good Stuff" that includes everything that has a rating. When I just want to listen to songs I know I like, I'll just set Party Shuffle to play that. The number of stars I give it doesn't really matter much, just a way for me to know how much I like that song. When I'm feeling adventerous, I set Party Shuffle to play a smart playlist I have setup called "Never Played" which has songs with a play count of 0, and as I listen to them, if I like them, I'll rate them, and they'll get added to the Good Stuff list.


As far as genres go, every song in my library is tagged with a genre, although, I don't really use them. I just assign what I feel fits the song best just because I'm anal about having all info filled in. Getting all of the years filled in next, I have a smart playlist that has everything without a year and when I have nothing better to do, I'll go through and add the year to some songs until I get bored with it, and come back later. Eventually I'll get that playlist down to nothing.
 
This is going to annoy a lot of you, but my ratings are set up like this;

5 Star - Good enough to listen to.
4 Star - OK, but not excellent.
3 Star - Poor.
2 Star - Rubbish.
1 Star - Why is this on my computer!?

As i mainly only copy albums that i like, 1127 of my 2061 song library is rated 5 star. Also, i rate all new songs songs 5 star (unless they are skits or intros), so that i will listen end up listening to them at some point, and be able to rate them.
Another thing that i always do is change the word 'and' to '&' so that song, artist and album tags are shorter and are more likely to fit on my Powerbook's 12" screen and my iPod's 2.5" screen.
I also replace 'Featuring/Feat.' with '&' or a comma, also to reduce the length of tags.
I never rate podcasts, audiobooks or videos, do any of you?
 
I would love it if iTunes could allow me to have ratings for albums, being the average of the ratings I had given for the songs making up that album.

Any ideas anyone?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back