i leave all 'spoken word' 'songs' at zero - that way they never show up in a list. the worst a song can get is 1 for me. similar to how foreign flicks don't get us ratings - they're in their own league...

No need to delete those zero-star tracks you don't like. Just uncheck them. Then check the box on your "zero star" smart playlist that says "Match checked songs only". Voila! All songs not worthy of a check have been removed from the playlist.

Hmmm. This rating thing is something I've never really understood. Why would anyone want a song that they don't rate highly (3-5 stars) wasting space on their hard drive/iPod?

I had the same question originally, Hitchcock. I thought that rating my songs would be a waste of time. But then I realized how often I skip past a song that is playing when listening to my library on shuffle. You see, if you buy an album, chances are it's because of 1 to 5 songs that you have heard on it and like. What about all the other tracks? There will always be a song on an album that you don't absolutely love. However, Unless I truly hate a song, I still rip it, just for the sake of completion, I guess. This is why I rate my music. Also, rating songs opens up a new dimension for smart playlists - you have no idea how helpful putting in "my rating is..." can be.

Hard drive space is cheap- iPod space is not.

Keeping low-rated songs around on the computer is not a problem for me.

Smart playlists let me add just the right number of these songs to my mix.

This is how I look at it: a zero-star rating simply means I haven't rated it yet. If I don't like a song, I assign it 1 star. I have a playlist that picks up all these 1 stars and I delete them when I get home to my computer. I don't keep songs I don't like as I'm conscious of my hard-drive space.

The lowest I'll go is 2 stars, and I don't have many of them.

What I have found when I began doing the "Music" scene is that I should only delete a file if I have a better copy or it is corrupt. In the 5 short years that I've been playing with my MP3 files, songs that I hated have gone to 4 or 5 stars, and others have fallen.

Hard drive space is so cheap, that it is quite useful to go for quantity and worry about quality later.

I do like the idea of using 1 star to mark songs as "unliked", I'll have to consider that one.

I've modified the use of 1 star, as outlined here:

http://smartplaylists.com/comments.php?id=P314_0_1_0_C

under the heading "* To Be Checked".

I guess I use unrated the way you use 1-star. Admittedly, it's hard at first to give a really good song a 1 star rating, but the rating scale is so much more useful as a 5-point (1-5) scale than a 4-point (2-5) or 3-point (3-5) scale. If you can't wrap your mind around keeping or liking one-star songs, think of the 1 to 5 star scale as a 6 to 10 scale.

Got a Playlist "Unrated" for all the 0 star songs that need rating - otherwise just keep hearing the same one's in most Often Played.
* - Tag error, fix
** - don't like, delete if need space
*** - average, good for a Shuffle
**** - like, good tune
*****- the best, crank it everytime!

I think of zero as unrated or neutral. Songs I don't like at all would be rated as a minus one - five (on my computer they are simply unchecked and not rated), whereas songs I do like are rated somewhere between one and five. However - to pick up those tracks that need to be fixed i don't in practice rate any songs as one star. I find a point scale sufficient.

So:
1 = fix or delete
2 = tolerate it
3 = like it
4 = love it
5 = can't get enough of it, love it heaps