I am a closet music historian, and a not-so-closeted music geek. Anyone who bothers to get to know me finds this out sooner or later. On that “Rock & Roll Jeopardy!” show that VH1 used to run, they used to ask a lot of questions about ’80s pop, and I found out watching that show that, basically, I would never have lost.

It’s not really anything to be proud of though, and I’ll tell you why. When you have this affliction, you do things like spend hours of time hunting down obscure artwork of 12″ singles from crappy “blue-eyed soul” bands so that the extended remix of some obscure 80s song you got on a compilation has the proper cover art when it pops up on your TV screen via Apple TV. You make sure the song has the right name (was that Loving or Lovin’?). You make sure it’s classified in the right year, which can involve quite a bit of reasearch for, say, old soul music that was only released on 7″ singles.

All in all, I’m not sure this is really the best way to spend your time.

iTunes (and tools like it, though I use iTunes) have been a godsend for music-loving OCD-types like me. If you properly tag your music, you can do something like listen to music of a particular genre from 1973, or you can easily make a playlist of every song you have with “fuck” in the title (57 songs long at the moment if you care). Yes, the possibilities are fucking endless.

Well, almost endless.

I have been forever irritated by iTunes’ ratings system. 1-5 stars? This is just not enough precision for a crazy person like me. It was especially irritating when, after perusing iTunes’ XML dumps, one learns that the rating is actually stored as a 1-100 integer. So, there are 5 levels of precision where there could be 100, meaning your one star is really a ‘20′ from iTunes’ point of view. I considered coding a tool to expose the 100 ratings points somehow, but figured the elegance wouldn’t be up to the standards I’d need to actually use it, and so decided to conform myself to the 1-5 scale. I settled on this:

★ – bad, or something non-music like an interlude between songs
★★ – better than awful, but don’t want it popping up on random play
★★★ – listenable
★★★★ – good
★★★★★ – excellent

This might raise a couple of questions. For instance, if music is bad, then why keep it? Partially it’s for completeness, and partially it’s because sometimes you might actually want bad music around…to laugh at, for instance. Then, what is the distinction between two stars and three stars? When I’m working, I only listen to 3 star-rated music or better. Two star music would be stuff like, for example, movie soundtracks, which I just don’t want appearing in my general listening, even if it’s good.

So, this system worked for a long time, but I found one major annoyance with it. The vast majority of music ended up being three stars. The thing is, within that 3 star music, there’s a lot of variation. Some stuff is pretty good, but just not good. Other stuff is really closer to two stars, but just good enough that it’ll make you smile if it pops up every now and then on random play, so you don’t want it completely buried. Then there’s stuff that you like, but that you know is bad…maybe you’d like that stuff to not pop up when you have friends over. (I know you know what I mean.)

Also, there are a lot of three star tracks that I actually like quite a bit, but I want the four star stuff and up to be really rather good, so that I can easily listen to my most outstanding music. I also use the four star rating as a convenient cutoff for what goes onto my iPhone, because it doesn’t have the capacity to handle my whole collection, and won’t anytime soon. I’d like to have a rating in between that could bring the cream of the three star stuff onto my iPhone.

So, a little google searching, and it turns out this problem is very easily solved. Just pop into the Terminal and enter:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Simple enough. Apple’s made iTunes able to handle it, but the preference is hidden.

Now I have a ten-level rating system that looks more like this:

½ – non-music or interlude between songs
★ – bad
★½ – better than awful, but only worth keeping for completeness
★★ – fair, but not suitable for general play
★★½ – listenable, but only as kitsch
★★★ – listenable
★★★½ – pretty good
★★★★ – good
★★★★½ – very good
★★★★★ – excellent

This makes things so much better. Now I can split those three-star songs into three tiers, essentially. I don’t need to worry about “I Need Love” by L.L. Cool J coming on at the wrong times, and I have another rating above for something like “Rock ‘N’ Me” by Steve Miller Band, which I do like, but don’t consider good enough to be among the elite.

Now, the possibilities are endless. (Well, not really, but I will enjoy my newfound freedom before I inevitably feel constrained by it.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 0:02 and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.