47. Rate Your Music on the iPod BEFORE YOU BEGIN 42 Transfer Your Music to Your iPod 46 Find and Play Music on the iPod SEE ALSO 36 Rate Your Music 48 Transfer Only Preferred Music to the iPod 73 Train iTunes to Play Your Favorite Music It's important to let iTunes know what music you like and what music you'd rather avoid. You saw how to set star ratings on your songs in iTunes in 36 Rate Your Music ; you can do the same thing on the iPod as well, setting star ratings on each song as you listen to it. When you synchronize the iPod with your iTunes Library , the star ratings you set on the iPod are incorporated back into the info tags of your songs in iTunes. Any Smart Playlists you might have defined using the My Rating field are updated to reflect your new settings. By diligently tagging each song you play with an appropriate rating, iTunes and the iPod both gain the ability to present music you'll like, making your listening experience better and better the more you use them. 1. | Play Music on the iPod As described in 46 Find and Play Music on the iPod, navigate to any playlist or other music source on the iPod and start the music playing with the Play/Pause or Select button. | 2. | Switch to Rating Mode While a song is playing, and after you've decided how many stars it's worth (from 1 to 5, the more the better), press the Select button twice. The first press puts the iPod into scan mode, which lets you skip immediately to an arbitrary point in the song by rotating the wheel. The second press, however, puts the iPod into rating mode, where the song's star rating (if set) is shown below the track, artist, and album names . | 3. | Set a Rating Use the wheel to set the number of stars you want to assign the song. If a rating has already been set, the wheel adjusts the number of stars up or down; otherwise , it begins at the default of zero stars and increases the number of stars as you rotate the wheel clockwise. 47. Rate Your Music on the iPod Press the Select button to set the star rating, or just wait a few seconds to let the iPod automatically go back to the ordinary Now Playing screen that shows the progress through the song. The rating is set. Repeat this process for every unrated song the iPod plays for you. NOTE The iPod saves information about the songs it's played (such as the star rating you've set and the Last Played field) on its internal disk as it plays; however, it only writes this information to the disk after every set of about five songs (the iPod has 32 megabytes of internal RAM, or temporary memory, which it fills with about five songs at a time to avoid accessing the disk too frequently). If you play a lot of music and set a lot of ratings, and then the iPod runs out of battery power and shuts down before you have a chance to synchronize it with iTunes, that information might be lost and won't be synchronized into your iTunes Library . Always be sure to sync your iPod after use! | 4. | Synchronize Your iPod with iTunes Connect your iPod to your computer using the Dock or included cable as described in 42 Transfer Your Music to Your iPod . When iTunes has finished exchanging information with the iPodtransferring newly added music to it and downloading the changes you've made while on the goyou'll be able to view the songs you listened to on the iPod using the Recently Played Smart Playlist, or by sorting the library using the Last Played column; the ratings you set on these songs on the iPod should be reflected in your iTunes' window. | |