I may be a moron, but I can't seem to find a way to assign a rating to the currently playing track using the keyboard. The only way seems to involve the mouse and bringing up the track's info window, clicking to the "Options" tab, and so on.
There's no way I'm going to rate more than a handful of tracks using such a slow and tedious method. But until I do, the "Party Shuffle" feature produces far less than optimal playlists.
I want something as easy as the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons on a Tivo. I hope that's not too much to ask for.
Hints, anyone? I've asked the all-knowing search engines for help and have come up dry so far.
Posted by jzawodn at July 15, 2004 04:55 PM
3rd Party solution, but you'll be glad you did: Synergy. Allows you to do this, plus lots of other cool stuff. A very reasonable $10. http://synergy.wincent.com/
just add rating to the display along with artist/album/genre by right clicking on the display bar and selecting it. then you can rate with just one click. ba-da-bing
Here's a simple thumbs-up:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Mac::Glue;
my $itunes = Mac::Glue->new("iTunes");
my $rating = $itunes->prop('current track')->prop('rating');
$itunes->set($rating => to => ($rating->get + 20))
if $rating->get < 81
Do you use a Mac? I have an AppleScript that works very nicely. While a song is playing in iTunes, I can just click on the AppleScript, from anywhere, and it brings up a dialog box with options for me to rate the song. And I never have to actually go INTO iTunes to do it.
Assuming you're on a mac, I just right click on the itunes icon in the dock and get to the rating through there. Not elegant, but slightly faster than going through the window.
Wow, thanks for all the suggestions. Clearly I'm not the only one to notice what an uneven product iTunes is. It's great in some ways and sucks amazingly in others.
Synergy really is most of what's missing from iTunes. Very nice.
The Perl Hacker in me will likely end up playing with Simon's suggestion too. :-)
I'm loving the mini iTunes remote (http://widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=36031) for Konfabulator. I just keep it stuck down in the corner of my screen. You can click on one of the stars on the expanded window to rate songs. It will also set iChat to your currently playing song, if you're into that kind of thing.
I use a Logitech "Internet Navigator" (or something equally cheesy) keyboard on my G5. It has buttons (>, play/pause, stop, volume, mute, etc.) that control iTunes. They're applescriptable, so you could modify, say, the volume buttons to set the rating...
Download 'Spark' and you can assign hotkeys to anything for free. To set the iTunes rating for the current track to 2:
tell application "iTunes"
set rating of current track to 40
end tell
Ratings go from 0 to 100 (five stars)
