06/28/10 @ 12:45AM EST
posted by will

Finally, after more than year, I managed to rate every song in my iTunes library. That's almost 10,000 songs. Why would do I do this?

Because I have so much music. Having it all rated allows me to sort it all better, and even more importantly, to give me a way to filter it all out. I got the idea of doing this from this post. As I was going through and rating it, it let me realize what music I had was crap, so I knew what to get rid of.

Most of my music I know fairly well, but there's stuff that I've downloaded (legally, of course) upon someone's recommendation, or after reading a record review. Stuff like that I probably haven't listened to as much, (or sometimes even at all...) so I won't always remember how I like it.

Depending on how I'm feeling, I can just listen to my 4+ or 5 star tracks. I can also just add a rule onto any smart playlist when I put it together saying 3+, 4+, or 5 stars. How I define ratings:

5 stars: Only the best (5.4%)
4 stars: Well above average (25.5%)
3 stars: Good, but not too special (63.9%)
2 stars: Just around to keep the album complete (2.2%)
1 star: Just a flag to delete it (0%, obviously)

During this whole process I went through everything trying to make sure albums are complete (thus a few 2 star ratings), everything is properly labelled, and with album art. Why? Probably a little bit obsessive.

Also, whenever someone's mocking some of my more girly music selections, they have more ammo: "And you gave this 5 stars?!"

I updated Twitter with my progress on the rating quest, you can see some of the excitement I grabbed from SnapBird:

[Photo: Flickr]

Took many hours
Meaningless accomplishments
Now it's so pretty

Godspeed.

[Tags: music]