Robb. Knight.

A few days ago, I got really fed up of having to manually create playlists of songs I love so I set out to rate my iTunes library, in the hopes of using smart playlists for more than just 'songs that were made in the 1990s'.

My first stop was finding out how much music I had; 12,136 songs to be exact. My second thought was something along the lines of "How the !@£$ am I going to rate that many songs?!". After hunting around the 'net for what seemed like an eternity looking at articles that basically said "Just get on with it: rate them all and you're done" I found out about a Mac App Store app called I Love Stars [ £0.69 App Store link].

I Love Stars is an app that sits in your menubar and allows you to rate your iTunes music with one click, avoiding the need to open iTunes for every new song. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts for each rating (1-5) as well as simply raising or lowering the rating.

So I had a method for rating individual songs, but I still needed to work out what the ratings would actually mean. This is what I decided on:

• Each song would have a base rating of three stars.
• Four stars are for songs that are above average.
• Five stars are for songs I love and can't get enough of.
• Two stars for songs that I can tolerate only for the sake of completeness e.g. songs that are part of an album or those party songs, you know the ones. Black Lace, anyone?
• One star ratings are designated for those stupid intro and filler tracks that artists think we like but don't.
• Anything else gets deleted.

Once I had decided on the rating system, I went into the manually created playlists I already had and rated those songs accordingly. This pretty much sorted the top 500 or so songs in my library. I then created a smart playlist that would show any songs that had the standard three star rating that I hadn't played in the last 24 hours. This then created the perfect list for me to simply play all the way through and rate each song as I listened. And because of the 'smart' element, once I had rated it up or down (if at all) it would get removed from the playlist and skip straight to the next song. I did this for couple of hours and now have over a third of my library rated correctly.

I am now in a position to create some smart playlists based on my ratings. I personally chose a few obvious playlists such as 5-star rated, 4 and 5 star in different genres, as well as a 1-star playlist so I can uncheck them, knowing they won't be played in iTunes when shuffling. Your mileage may vary, and it helps to have a well-organised library to start with, but the best advice I can give is to install I Love Stars and just star rating songs as you're listening, rather than making it a repetitive activity looking at a long list of songs. Let me know in the comments how you get on, and if you've got any tips to improve on what I'm doing with my library.