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AutoRate your iTunes music (Mac)

by Jason Clarke on May 21, 2007 at 09:00 PM

Our previous iTunes tip for creating playlists involved manually tagging each song you listen to based on the mood you feel it represents. If you're too lazy for that, maybe you'd prefer AutoRate. The concept of Autorate is simple; look at your listening habits, and rate your iTunes / iPod music based on how often you listen to a song, and how often you skip it.

While we tend to be way too control-freaky to use an approach like this to rate our entire playlist, we did test it on small subsets (albums that hadn't previously been rated), and it's surprisingly good in that context. It's unclear how well it would work on a very large music library where many songs rarely ever play, but for specific applications like rating specific albums it works quite well, although you do have to manually create a playlist of all of the songs on the album first.

AutoRate is a free Mac download.

Tags: AutoRate, freeware, iTunes, playlists, song ratings, SongRatings

Comments

RauglothgorMay 21st 2007 10:19PM

Neutral

Yeah, yeah. We get it. There are dozens of great itunes addons for mac only. How about some pc lovin. Spread it around a bit.

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dorianMay 22nd 2007 12:33AM

Neutral

i second that notion

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EnriqueMay 22nd 2007 2:15PM

Neutral

I agree too -

Are there any iTunes add-ons that figure out a song's Beats Per Minute? I think it would be a cool way to build smart playlists from if I had the BPM's for all my songs....

Working on a Gym Playlist? Make an SPL with a high rate of BPM's. Trying to fall asleep listening to a random group of 10 songs, but don't want any MegaDeath to keep you up? Make an SPL with 10 random songs with a low BPM rate.

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TonyMay 23rd 2007 1:23AM

Neutral

"Are there any iTunes add-ons that figure out a song's Beats Per Minute? I think it would be a cool way to build smart playlists from if I had the BPM's for all my songs...."

Yes, there is:

http://www.potionfactory.com/blog/2006/10/19/introducing-tangerine/

(It is, however, Mac only...Sorry...I guess the Unix-y goodness and easy scriptability of OS X is good for *something*, right?)

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