Rate Your Music in iTunes

Ok, this is for all you iTunes users out there. If you listen to a lot of music, you should really consider rating it. It takes a substantial amount of time up-front, but if you use your computer as your primary music player, it's worth it. I promise.

iTunes allows you to rate your music on a scale of 1-5 stars. You can highlight groups of songs and rate them all at once. I rate them this way:

5 - Songs that are the best of the best
4 - Songs that I want to listen to regularly
3 - Songs that I want to listen to once in a while, but not when I'm playing music on random
2 - Songs that are not good, but for some reason I don't want to delete them.
1 - Absolutely terrible. Why do I even own this song? (you know you've got a few of these)
0 - I haven't listened enough to make up my mind. Mostly newly acquired music.

Rating your music is important because of another great iTunes feature: Smart Playlists.

Out of the box, iTunes comes pre-loaded with a "My Top Rated" playlist, which is all of your 4 and 5-star songs. Just having this list makes rating your songs worth it. You can set iTunes DJ (formerly Party Shuffle) to draw only from that list, and you've got a nice random selection of only your good music.

But there's plenty more you can do with it. You can set a smart playlist to satisfy any criteria you want. Here are my lists:

• My Top Rated
• Unrated
• Maybe Good (combination of Top Rated & Unrated. This is my standard go-to list.)
• Recent Favorites (the 50 most recently added songs that are 4-or-more stars)
• Recently Played (anything I've listened to in the last 2 weeks)
• Music & Indiefeed (This takes my entire music library, and adds Indiefeed, a music podcast. I set all of my playlists to pull from this list instead of my normal music library.)
  

Those work for me, but be creative! Think about the music that you always want to hear, and set up a list to put it all in one place. Do you always want to listen to the same stuff? Set up a list made of the songs you listen to most often. Do you want to make sure you get variety? Set up a list of songs you listen to least often. Add a requirement for them to be 4 or 5 stars, if you want. Really, you can use almost any parameter.

I believe this works the same way in Windows Media Player, but if you're using that, switch to iTunes. This works the same way in Songbird, also, but if you're using that, you probably don't have much use for my advice (although I encourage anyone who enjoys Firefox extensions to give it a try).