The bugs with album rating

As far as I know, there is still no proper fix for this. All I can offer is to let you know what I think is happening

I've experienced this problem myself, but the nature of it is not as bad as it was in older versions of iTunes, believe it or not. More on that later.

What appears to be happening is that when you give a song a rating, iTunes takes that individual rating, uses it to "calculate" an average and the applies that average rating to the whole album.

I suggest that you try to confirm for yourself that this is what's happening. I've tried this experiment myself, just for this discussion, so this is current:

• prepare the Songs view your iTunes Library to show both the song Rating and the Album Rating columns as shown below. Notice that none of the songs on the album I'm showing is currently rated:

• I gave one song on an album a song rating of 3 stars. As you can see, this has caused every song on that album to now be rated with an Album Rating of 3 stars, which I consider to be wrong. I have bought albums for one or two songs, but positively dislike others on the same album, so I specifically do not want the whole album to be rated according to just one song.

(If you think this is bad, older versions of iTunes then took that album rating and assigned it as an individual song rating to each song on the album! So with that version of iTunes, when I rated one song with 3 stars because I liked it, iTunes would give 3 stars to the songs I had not rated because I considered them to be unworthy of any rating at all)

• Back to the main discussion: I subsequently gave a second song a rating of 5 stars, but look what happened to the Album Rating:

It now becomes obvious that iTunes is using the rating of songs to assign an average rating to the album. But it's not even correct! As far as I'm concerned, that "average" rating is wrong beyond words. I had a lengthy discussion with other long-time users here almost six years ago and it left me frustrated and perplexed. It appears that a large number of people (and Apple) have no idea how to calculate averages. Look at the following screenshot, when I changed the 3 star rating to 1 star, gave a further two songs 1 star as well, but also gave two songs 5 stars:

So even though I rated fewer than half of the songs on the album, and only two of them are higher than 1 star, the complete album is "rated" as 3 stars. That's not the rating I would give it (no offence to the artist or this specific album by the way).

Averages are correctly calculated as follows:

• determine the total number of stars: 2 (songs) at 5 (stars) + 3 (songs) at 1 (star) gives 10 + 3 = 13. This is correct
• divide that total by the quantity of items used to find the above total: 13 (stars in total) / 5 (starred songs) = 2.6, rounded up, correctly, to 3
• allocate that average to the items that were used to calculate it. So while 3 is the correct average for five of songs on the album, it should not be used as an average for the other tracks

• to find the correct average for the complete album, one must use the total number of songs on the album, which is not 5, but (by coincidence) is 13
• so to assign an "average" to all the songs, as iTunes has done in the screenshot above, the arithmetic is:
• 2 (songs) at 5 (stars) + 3 (songs) at 1 (star) + 8 (songs) at 0 (stars) = 13 (stars in total)
• 13 (stars) / 13 (songs) = 1 (that's 13 stars divided by the 13 songs to which the average is going to be applied)
• so if one were to give an average album rating to this album, it should be 1, not 3

So the reason that I don't use Album Rating is because it is meaningless, whether it is calculated correctly or the Apple way.

But at least now, iTunes doesn't give that average rating to the individual songs, as it used to do. Look at this one, from 2017, but note that the Rating and the Album Rating columns are swapped compared to the previous pictures:

In the picture above, snapped from my iTunes Library in June 2017, I gave one song a 3-star rating (the blue stars). As you can see, iTunes then gave the whole album a (blue star) rating of 3 stars and then as a consequence gave all the other songs a greyed-out rating of 3 stars. That in turn put all the greyed out 3 star songs into my 3 stars Smart Playlist - definitely not what I wanted.

So until Apple take the time to understand what users actually want from ratings, there is no solution other than to not use the Album Rating. Sorry that I could offer better news.

I seem to recall there is, or has been at some point, a bug where auto ratings that occur on a device due to a manual rating may then sync back to iTunes as manual ratings. You cannot change album rating from that column show in the screenshots here, it must be done from the artwork column at the left when it is wide enough, or from the albums view.

If you want I can modify one of the existing scripts so that it clears unwanted manual ratings, either setting to zero to allow auto ratings to occur, or 1% to suppress them.

tt2

Shotkey wrote:

Did you manage to somehow remove those blue stars on your album "Acapulco Now! < A >"?

That's a good question. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that I know. Here's a screenshot of the same album today:

Don't worry about the (now missing) < A >. It was my personal addition, but since I've forgotten its purpose, I've removed it since the previous screenshot. I think it's unlikely that removing the < A > caused the correction.

You will notice that I've rated an additional song and that the Album Rating (although still incorrect) is at least in grey, which indicates (to me) that it's an automatic allocation and that the other non-rated songs are no longer auto-rated in grey as they were. I can only assume that there was an iTunes control file that was causing this issue and that it was corrected by an iTunes update. That however, is a big guess on my part.

On the subject of updates (i.e. the latest version), if you are not using the latest version of iTunes, I suggest that you update it. Note though, that if you're using:

• Windows 7 or Windows 8, the latest version of iTunes for those operating systems is 12.10.11.2
• Windows 10 and Windows 11, the latest version is iTunes 12.12.2.2

If you have downloaded iTunes from the Microsoft Store (Windows 10 or 11), updates are automatic and I believe there is no Check for Updates option on the Help menu.

I notice that English may not be your first language. So let me explain:

the fiend wrote:

What appears to be happening is that when you give a song a rating, iTunes takes that individual rating, uses it to "calculate" an average and the applies that average rating to the whole album.

My use of the " " marks around a word indicates (by my country's convention) that the enclosed text should be treated with caution, or perhaps even contempt.

See the user tip Handling grey stars - Apple Community for more on this issue and some scripts you might be able to use to clean things up.

tt2

You cannot host files on this site. I'll add an equivalent to my site when I get a moment.

tt2