I tend to rate songs or tracks in iTunes or iOS Music with stars, as I’ve written about before. As Kirk McElhearn explains, recent versions if iTunes automatically calculate song and album ratings for an entire album even if you’ve manually rated only one song. This totally ruined Kirk’s — and my — smart playlists.
The only surefire way to solve the problem is to use Applescripts to clear the imputed album and track ratings — that appear in iTunes as gray stars — so that the only tracks that are rated are the ones I’ve manually selected — blue stars.
Two good solutions are the Album Rating Reset script from Doug’s Applescripts (I select “None/clear”), or the ClearAlbumAutoRating script from this Apple Support forum thread (scroll down to the post from “turingtest2”, which links to four Applescripts that both clear or restore auto ratings).
When I’m poking around inside iTunes and browsing albums, I find the ClearAlbumAutoRating script to be the easiest and quickest to use. Just select the album or a track, run the script, and the despised album rating disappears.
But for playlists or large selections of multiple albums, I like Doug Adams’ script. The beautiful aspect of Doug’s script is its simplicity. Run the script to display the Album Rating Reset window. Select a playlist or group of albums and the script gathers all the necessary track and album info; it told me, for example, that my 2-star playlist contained 125 albums. I selected an album rating of “None/clear”, clicked Apply, and saw my beloved playlist cleared of those gray-starred blemishes.
