Recently I started importing a large number of CDs into my iTunes library. I set up an “Unrated” playlist to play the songs/tracks that I hadn’t rated yet. As I was rating songs I noticed that some songs started disappearing from the playlist even though I hadn’t rated them yet. Googling this didn’t reveal anything useful other than that there was an album rating being applied to each track, and this was causing the songs to be removed from the playlist.
The solutions that people mentioned didn’t work for me, and those involved doing something in iTunes to remove the album rating. Some people mentioned that using AppleScript could help fix the issue, and while I couldn’t find any actual scripts I did create one that seemed to have resolved the issue for me.
tell application "iTunes" repeat with thetrack in the tracks in the first library playlist if the album rating in thetrack is greater than 0 then set the album rating in thetrack to 0 end if end repeat end tell
This will clear the album rating for any track that has one set. It only clears the album rating for a track, and not the album rating for an album.
In AppleScript there were no iTunes objects for an album. Only tracks, aka songs, on the album. That means after running this script all of your songs should have no ratings that are light grey, but if you view the album rating for a track there will still be something there if at least one of the songs on that album has been rated.
Why does the problem happen in the first place? I did tried testing somethings and I found that when you rate a song in the iOS version of iTunes it seems to set the album rating for all of the songs. When I tried rating a song in the Mac OS X version of iTunes only the song I rated was changed, but the “Album Rating” column still showed something and it was still light grey.
I think that the album rating is a calculated field based on the ratings of all of the rated songs in an album. That would explain why there is no place to change it. It’s probably a bug in the iOS version if iTunes that causes it to be set on each track.
Hope this information is useful.