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Rate music quickly

If you work while listening to iTunes on your Mac, and want to rate your music quickly, here are some tips:

1. Create an "unrated" smart playlist in iTunes:

My rating is (nothing)
Size is greater than 0 MB

Turn on Live Updating

The second item keeps you from rating streams.

2. Either get the handy Synergy preference pane, or some kind of hotkey launcher.

3. If you use Synergy, set hotkeys for play/pause and for each star rating you'll want to use.

If you are using a hotkey launcher, you'll need to work with Applescript. Launch the Script Editor and paste in the following

tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
set thisTrack to current track
set currentRating to thisTrack's rating
set thisTrack's rating to 80
end if
end tell

Note the "80" above: that sets the currently playing track to 4 stars. You'll want to create versions of this with 100/80/60/40/20.

Once you've done that, save the scripts somewhere and create hotkey actions that launch the script in question.

When you feel like rating some music, set your playlist to Unrated and go. At any point when a song is playing, punch the appropriate key combination to rate it. As soon as you rate it, play will stop, so start it again. You can grind through a lot of music this way.

by Adam Rice on Jan 19 | 8:00 am

[0] Trackbacks

That seems like a lot more work than it's worth, and what about the joy of listening to a whole song? Easier for me is to select a rating from iTunes' Dock menu and once in a while get info on the Unrated playlist and OK it to update it.

by on Jan 22 | 10:43 am

I took the original idea of an unrated playlist posted here, refined it a bit (added options so that my audiobooks wouldn't be included in the list), set the hotkeys in the Synergy preferences for quick ratings with uninterrupted music playback, then set the Party Shuffle playlist in iTunes to play my "unrated list." This gives me a nice random selection of music to listen to as I work, I can quickly rate music on the fly with Synergy's hotkeys and if I want to, I can actually flip over to iTunes and look at what's just played (and catch anything that I didn't manage to rate while it was playing), see what's coming up and keep track of things that I want to rate as an album (I have some theme albums that I want to hear in track order).

Makes rating music an enjoyable experience.

by on Aug 12 | 11:17 pm

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	Chris Henley: Try this guy out. He has some great stuff. http://ott ... Jun 13 \| 1:56 pm Chris Henley: IS this site still running? ... Jun 09 \| 5:06 pm Elizabeth: Now, is there a program that will put these lyrics on your Ipod? That would be genius... :D ... Apr 18, 06 \| 6:11 pm Sara S: Ah, I see your point now, especially with the running example. About the only workaround there would be to make ... Apr 16 \| 10:29 pm vaughnn: Sara, Thank you again for your consideration! ... Apr 15 \| 10:45 pm vaughnn: Good question Sara! I (usually) don't listen to the iPod with it in my pocket and little ear buds plugged into ... Apr 15 \| 1:53 pm Sara S: I don't think you're really reading what I wrote. Maybe I'm not explaining myself well. I didn't adovcate creating a single ... Apr 13 \| 10:13 am

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