Friday, November 1, 2013

Use Half-Star Ratings in iTunes

iTunes lets you rate songs, movies, and TV shows with between zero and five stars. This can be done by right-clicking the file within iTunes and selecting from Rating on the menu that appears or by clicking under the Rating heading to the right of the filename if you have Column view activated.

You can use the star ratings you’ve applied to arrange the order of your song collections by clicking the Rating heading, which will list all your favorite media files first. The information is also used by iTunes to divine your favorite music for playlists.

But if you’re a truly discerning music critic, you might not think five stars is enough. One song might be worth only four-and-a-half stars, for example. Well, using a secret setting, you can activate half-star increments within ratings.

Activating and Using Half-Star Ratings

Quit iTunes, open a Terminal window (open Finder, select the Applications list, and then in the list of applications double-click Terminal within the Utilities folder), and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE


When you restart iTunes, you can apply half-star settings to your media by switching to List view (hit Option+Command+ 3 ) and then clicking and dragging right and left within under the Ratings heading of a song’s entry within the list. You have to be subtle when dragging, however, because the half-star ratings are only a nudge away from the full-star ratings.

Alternatively, you can select the file, hit Command+ I , and in the dialog box that appears select the Options tab. Then click and drag in the Rating box, as described earlier.

Deactivating Half-Star Ratings

If in the future you’d like to return to full-star ratings only, again quit iTunes and open a Terminal window, before typing the following:


defaults delete com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars


When you restart iTunes, you should find that any items you previously gave half-star ratings to are now rounded down to the nearest full-star rating.






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