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I have a smart playlist in iTunes which is all the tracks I've rated 5 stars. I recently rated an album 5 stars, now it shows up in the playlist. Apparently unrated tracks inherit the album's rating. How do I make a convenient smart playlist which only includes tracks explicitly rated 5 stars, not inherited from the album?

(Note: I don't want to artificially down rate tracks in a rated album)

Thank you.

3 Answers 3

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I don't think there's a way to do this with a smart playlist. But you can use AppleScript to find your five-star songs, and create a playlist with them. You'll have to manually run the script every so often, to update the playlist.

property playlistName : "Favorite Songs"

tell application "iTunes"
    if not (exists playlist playlistName) then
        make new user playlist with properties {name:playlistName}
    else
        delete every track of playlist playlistName
    end if
    set favoriteSongs to every track whose rating is 100 and rating kind is user
    repeat with thisTrack in favoriteSongs
        duplicate thisTrack to playlist playlistName
    end repeat
end tell
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  • Better than nothing, thanks! And you can really say "track whose rating is" in Applescript? Wacky!
    – Schwern
    Dec 14, 2012 at 2:12
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As far as I know this is not impossible.

I think you could benefit from reading hessi's "using itunes" series; I'm gonna give you a relevant quote from him:

Unfortunately, I have not yet found a way to keep these songs out of normal rating-based playlists, which means that tracks that are not rated yet could show up in your 5 stars playlists just because you rated the album with 5 stars. My advise would be to stick to one logic, either rating tracks or albums, but not both.

http://hessi.tumblr.com/post/1116843969/using-itunes-part-4-lets-get-the-rating-started

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I typically rate all of my albums explicitly with the allmusic.com rating, and rate only a subset of songs otherwise with my own rating. When I rate a song explicitly, I set the Comments field to "rated". This allows me to create a smart playlist such as "Great Songs": Rating is greater than 4.0 and Comments is rated. This gives me a list of great songs that I've rated explicitly.

It's a hack, and a little extra work, but does the job if you use the Album Rating feature.

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