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beaTunes News

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Update: beaTunes 5.2.23

Song and album ratings in iTunes/Music have been quite the hot topic at some point, because iTunes computed them in some cases automatically. Visually, these computed ratings were differentiated in the UI from the manually entered one by using gray as color (for the rating stars) instead of black or the accent color (usually blue).

beaTunes followed this convention. However, there were some shortcomings in how it handled computed/manual ratings in the rest of the application. First of all, when opening the Get Info panel in beaTunes, it would always show the rating in solid black, regardless whether it had been manually entered or computed. In 5.2.23 this has been changed to only showing a rating, if it has been manually entered. A similar behavior has been implemented for the multi-song Get Info panel. Only if all selected songs have the same manually entered rating, it is shown, otherwise the rating is undefined.

The second issue occurs when sorting songs by rating. By default the computed ratings were treated just like manually entered ratings. Version 5.2.23 offers an alternative (secondary) sort order. By clicking on the table header of the Rating column (not the arrow, but "Rating"), you can toggle the sort order to first sort by computed or not (note that other columns also offer similar secondary sort orders, for example, the album or artist columns).

The third issue addressed in 5.2.23 deals with the creation of Matchlists. Previously, it has been impossible to distinguish between manually entered ratings and automatically computed ones, when specifying a Matchlist filter. This is now possible by setting the new Rating (computed) field to true or false. A similar field now also exists for Album Rating (computed).

As always, you can download the new version from the download section of the website.

Changes in 5.2.23

Improved handling of song/album ratings computed by iTunes/Music.
Fixed "Where is Music?" error on macOS 10.14 and earlier.

Labels: macOS, Matchlist, Ratings

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Showing Half-Star Ratings in iTunes

Some songs really aren't worth 5 stars. Nevertheless, they aren't quite 4 stars, either. How about 4.5?

Believe it or not, iTunes has supported half stars for a long, long time. But the feature is not enabled by default (for whatever reason). How do you enable it? Well, that depends...

Let the (half)star rise... on OS X

If you are using the OS X version of iTunes, first shut down iTunes, then open the Terminal.app. It should be in the Utilities subfolder of Applications. If you can't find it, simply start it via Spotlight.

Then, in the terminal window, type the following:

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

Note, that this is only one line, even if your browser chooses to add some line breaks. Once that's done, start iTunes and you should be set.

Pretty easy, right?

... and now for Windows

If you're on Window, first, shut down iTunes. Then find the file iTunesPrefs.xml. On XP it's typically in:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes

On Windows 7 or Vista, it's in:

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes

Once you have found the file, open it with a simple text editor like Notepad (do not use Word!). Then find a section where it says:

<key>User Preferences</key> <dict>

Underneath, add the following four lines:

<key>allow-half-stars</key> <data> dHJ1ZQ== </data>

Now save the file and start iTunes. You're set: Half stars should be enabled.

Rating Support in beaTunes

Starting with beaTunes 3, beaTunes also offers support for half-stars. Furthermore, unlike many other applications, it makes an effort to import rating tags from other programs like Traktor.

Labels: iTunes, Ratings, Traktor