rate all my songs on iTunes

...which conveniently rates your songs for you based on your listening habits. And grabs suggested songs from last.fm and queues them. And generally beats iTunes’ ass all over the place.

Go Amarok!
http://amarok.kde.org

now I have 26000 songs, of which 22000 unrated.

On average, my ipod plays some 150 songs during a work day.

With me walking around, helping people out, going for lunch and generally being distracted I am happy if I manage to rate some 40-50 songs a day. But I plod on regardless. Some 2300 songs to go (and that is just in the acoustic-soft listing)

As I suspected, most songs rate 3-star for me (average, not bad, not good) but I have already (re)discovered some 5-star jewels.

Another bonus I had not considered is that low-rated songs (1 and 2 stars) can be gathered in a playlist of their own and then removed from the ipod, saving more space for good songs.

tagged all my MP3s with broad generalisations like ‘acoustic-soft’,’acoustic-hard’,’electronic-soft’ and so forth (I used the comment field to store these meta-genre tags) and then created playlists matching unrated songs with one of these broad genre tags. The main reason to do this is so that when going through these songs I don’t get Bob Dylan after some hardcore Drum ‘n Bass.

Anyway, I set up my ipod dock at work and am now methodically going through my songs. Currently playing Unrated/Acoustic-Soft; 32 done, 2783 to go…

20000 songs, 1000 rated. Smart playlists with song rating as one of the parameters have taught me the value of rating songs, so I’m going to soldier on. But it’s a daunting goal.

It’s kind of sucky that it is an iTunes DB thing only, AFAIK the rating goes when your iTunes DB blows up in your face. It should really be a part of the tag. so BACK UP your iTunes DB people! (as well as your mp3s)