36. Rate Your Music BEFORE YOU BEGIN 9 Import a Music CD into iTunes 20 Purchase Audio from the iTunes Music Store 33 Find and Play Music SEE ALSO 35 Create a Smart Playlist 47 Rate Your Music on the iPod 73 Train iTunes to Play Your Favorite Music iTunes isn't just a passive servant to your commands. It's also a trainable assistant that learns your preferences as you play your music and can serve up your favorites in place of those tracks you'd rather skip. All you have to do, as you play music in iTunes, is to set the My Rating field on your songs to anything between one and five stars, corresponding to your reaction to each track. For example, the meanings I use to interpret each star rating in my own library are as follows : | My absolute favorite tracks of allmusically superb and enjoyable in any circumstances. | | Music I actively enjoy listening to and would take the time to seek out. | | Music to which I have no specific objection and don't mind listening to. | | Tracks that actively annoy me in some particular way. | | Tracks I would prefer never to have to listen to, unless I specifically ask for them. | After you've set these ratings on most or all of the tracks in your library, it's a simple matter to set up a Smart Playlist that selects from your favorite tunes, automatically mixing up a batch of music you're guaranteed to enjoy. NOTE The star rating is held within the iTunes database itself, not saved as a part of the song in its internal info tags . This means that if your iTunes Library database becomes lost or corrupted, your star ratings (along with your Last Played and Date Added fields) are lost. See 94 Back Up Your Music to CD or DVD for ways to keep yourself protected against data loss. 36. Rate Your Music 1. | Play Music in iTunes Using the Library view or a playlist, play your music as you normally would. As you listen, consider the five-star rating system and how you would categorize the songs you're hearing relative to each other. (You don't have to be playing a song to rate it in this way, but it helps to be hearing it as you consider its rating.) | 2. | Set a Rating in the My Rating Column Select a song by clicking it. In the My Rating column, small dots appear indicating where the five stars would go. Click one of the dots to set that number of stars, or click and drag left and right to adjust the star rating. The rating is set as soon as you click the setting in the song listing. NOTE Refer to 71 Customize Which Information Columns Are Displayed if the My Rating column is not visible. | 3. | Set a Rating in the Dock or System Tray While a song is playing, you can set its rating through another, more direct method: using the System Tray (in Windows) or the Dock (in Mac OS X). In either case, right-click (or Control +click) the iTunes icon to display the context menu; from the My Rating submenu, choose the appropriate number of stars (choose None to clear the rating). | 4. | Organize Music by Rating After you've set ratings on the bulk of the songs in your library, you can organize your music in a number of ways that are affected by the star ratings. Sort the music in the library on the My Rating column, in descending order, to see your favorite songs first. Create a Smart Playlist with a limited number of songs selected by highest rating . In the Party Shuffle playlist ( 39 Use the Party Shuffle Playlist ), select Play higher rated songs more often to "weight" the appearance of songs according to their ratings. | |