Schinckel.net

I recently performed an experiment to examine how iTunes handles 0-100 ratings - the result was “Not very well.” Something made me repeat the experiment, but this time with just tracks rated 0,10,20,…,90,100. That is, no stars, half a star, one star, and so on. For those playing at home: I just used a Smart Playlist where name contains 0, and used the procedure in the previous linked post. Here is a graph showing the results. I’ve annotated it in a couple of places. The first thing to notice is that the yellow line shows the relative frequency of tracks played with whole star ratings, excepting no stars. As expected, this is a linear relationship. The interesting thing is that the zero-rated track does not lie on this line. Instead, the half-star track does. This becomes even more interesting, when considering this: one-half star is the only one where the frequency differs from the rounded down full star rating. The moral of this story: rate your songs as 0-5 stars, or ½-star only. Don’t bother about the other values…