HiRate

A hidden rating system is built into iTunes that allows items to be rated on a scale of 0 to 100 instead of just 0 to 5. In fact, a one star rating is really 20, a two star rating is really 40, and so on and so forth. With HiRate, you can take advantage of this hidden feature to improve your iTunes ratings. Maybe you have an item that you rated four-star, but like a bit better than other four-star songs. Using HiRate, you can raise the rating to 81. It will still show up in iTunes as a four-star song, but you'll see it at the top of your four-star songs when sorting by rating.

Download HiRate 1.0 for Mac OS X (39 KB)

Download HiRate 1.0b1 for Mac OS X (34 KB - OLD VERSION)

Why won't HiRate work with Smart Playlists?

Since iTunes doesn't fully support the extended rating scale, Smart Playlists that depend on ratings won't work with songs that aren't rated 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100 (the default iTunes ratings.) Since there's no easy way to choose custom ratings in Smart Playlists, it's basically impossible.

There is a kludgy workaround though... this example assumes you want to make a playlist containing all Country songs thatare rated from 60 to 80:

1. Make a Smart Playlist that includes all songs that are rated greater than two stars, and less than five stars. Set it so that it matches ALL of the conditions. This playlist will give you everything rated 60 (three stars) to 80 (four stars.) Name it “60 to 80? or something of that sort.

2. Make another Smart Playlist that includes all songs where Genre is Country and Playlist is “60 to 80,” or whatever you named your last playlist. Set it so that it matches ALL of the conditions.

HiRate is more or less unsupported - I don't really do support, but feel free to email me with questions, comments, or bug reports.

Software updates and information, as well as sneak peeks at upcoming software are posted on the MichaelNet Weblog.

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1.0 - Mission: Make The Interface Smaller Than iTunes (3/14/2005)

• Most unimportant UI elements are smaller
• The Quick Rating text has been removed
• The heading for numeric equivalents is gone now
• Added an "Album" field.
• Changed the documentation to reflect changes and clarify a few issues.
• All references to 1.0b1 should now be changed to as 1.0.
• Added an Easter Egg. :-)
• Title, Artist, and Album fields are now selectable, so you can copy the text.
• Fixed a silly bug that wouldn't let you close the about box with Command-W

1.0b1 - First Beta Release (2/5/2005)

• Initial Beta Release

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Last updated 9/4/05