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Just loaded a bunch of songs into my itunes library recently (1500+). I wish there was a quicker way to rate through them other than:1) Sample song for up to 10 seconds
2) Rate it
3) Next song.
The problem is: 1500 x 10 seconds / 60 secs = 250 min > 4 hours.
Best case scenario is it taking 2 seconds a song: 1500 x 2 seconds / 60 seconds = 50 min < 1 hour.
So 1-4 hours later, I should be done.
But this process is even slower if I have to rate my songs from my iPod. The damn thing won’t stay in the rate song mode. It’ll keep the 5 star rating mode up for about 5-10 seconds and then will revert back to the volume mode. And pressing the middle click wheel button 3 times just to get back to it once I’m ready to rate another song is just down right annoying.
I could also “rate by artist” and give an artist I’m already comfortable with a standard baseline rating. But what about the occasional sucky songs? Or even the good songs? Still have to sample the songs sooner or later and bump it up or down.
Another problem to conquer is tags (metadata) associated with each song. There are apparently programs that will tag your songs for you based off their file characteristics, even by sampling some of the song. But I haven’t tried this yet.
But this program, iTunes Tagger, looks promising. It’ll use sampling/fingerprinting by checking against Last.fm or musicbrainz. And here is another called Tweet that seems to work similarly. I haven’t tested any of these yet, but I will try them and post my results asap.
Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 12:25 amand is filed under ipod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 27th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
This is why it took me so long to rate my catalog, which as of today stands at 3878 songs. Of course that’s not everything I have in mp3’s, that stands at 5789.
I definitely think that the rating should be done on the computer if you want to do it quickly. Waddya do? raid someone’s cd collection? hehe 
I tell ya though, nothing like some killer smart playlists to keep the music rocking on your ipod! Plus, once you’ve rated your catalog it’s not too hard to rate a few songs as you add them. Even if it’s an entire cd…
July 27th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Well I have two collections that I “raided” from some friends a long time ago and dumped their music onto the iPod. I’ve got about 4700+ currently, and I still need to keep pruning it (I probably have about a 100 or 200 or so I need to delete). I filled her up.
I love Green Day and Collective Soul, but that was about all I was ever hearing, so I had to spice things up a bit.