AutoRate: Simple Music Ratings for iTunes

If you’re like me, then the empty stars next to your songs in iTunes are a source of constant, nagging guilt. I know, one of these days you will get around to rating your music collection, or at least that’s what you keep telling yourself. Unfortunately, that’s never going to happen; once you get a few thousand songs, rating your collection will be stuck in a state of perpetual procrastination. Fortunately for both of us, there’s AutoRate.

AutoRate is a small program (and I mean small, the download is 104k) that will sift through your iTunes Collection of Shame, and rate each and every single track based on play count and frequency. This may sound like it isn’t a very good way to rate songs, but I have found the opposite to be true. When I first downloaded the program about a year ago I thought, “Neat,” set it up to run automatically (there are instructions as to how in the readme file), and promptly forgot about it. About a week ago, I started up iTunes and just hit play without paying attention. About five songs in, I was thinking that I had created an awesome playlist and then forgotten about it, but when I checked, that was not the case. Instead, my list had simply been sorted by rating and I was playing my 5-star songs.

Granted, rating by statistics is not perfect, but the program is configurable enough to make it work. When you open the Preferences pane for the program, you only have a few different options, but even so it manages to feel robust. For example, you can set whether it biases towards play count or frequency, you can set it to only rate songs that have not yet been rated, and you can choose whether you want the program to only rate songs in certain playlists or in the entire library.

There were two options whose functions were not immediately obvious, but which were explained on the forums. The first is whether the program uses cached data, which basically means whether it will reanalyze all of the songs when you run it. The second, which I think is much more interesting, is labeled “Existing rating memory”, and its function is to determine the weight that will be given to existing ratings. At one end of the slider, you have “None”, which will mean that the program will not take old ratings into account at all. At the other end you have “Full”, which means that the program will base the new ratings almost entirely off of existing ratings (if you don’t want it to modify existing ratings at all, there is an option for that as well). This option has turned out to be one of my favorite, as it allows me to rate music as I import it, and then the program will adjust that rating based on whether or not I actually listen to that music.

In the end, AutoRate does a good job, so long as you understand that it is only meant to do the heavy lifting. You might still have to tweak some of the ratings, for example I have changed a few ratings, but not many. Even if you don’t like the ratings that the program assigns, at the very least your music collection will at least look like it has been rated, enough to trick your friends and maybe get rid of some of that guilt that you’ve been carrying.

AutoRate is freeware, available for download from Tzi Software.