I have such a large collection of music that 5 stars doesn’t really give me the kind of granularity that I need to rate my music, so I started looking to see if there was a way to tweak that number. I came across this Lifehacker article which explained how to do it on a Mac, but that didn’t help me because my desktop runs Windows Vista (groan). After some more poking around I came across this helpful post and it worked perfectly.
Here’s a quick summary:
If you’re on a Mac
All you have to do is run this command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE
If you’re using Windows
- Make sure to close iTunes first, otherwise your changes will be overwritten when it shuts down
- Search for the file iTunesPrefs.xml. If you’re using XP, you’ll find it at C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes. For Vista, it’ll probably be in the directory C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes
- Open this file in your favorite text editor
- Search for this block of text:
<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>and just underneath it, add
<key>allow-half-stars</key>
<data>
dHJ1ZQ==
</data> - Close and save the file, then start iTunes
You’ll now be able to give your songs half star ratings! Note: you’ll need to click on the stars themselves next to your song; the right-click menu will still only show single star ratings as options.
Let’s say I have my iPod synced with an instance of iTunes on PC A. My playlists are there, my ratings are there, and my iPod is there.
How do I port all of the above to PC B? Is there a backup system I can’t find that will preserve my playlists, ratings, etc. so I don’t have to recreate anything on PC B?
I’m pretty sure you can just move your iTunes directory over to another PC. I’ve done that a few times and it’s worked fine. The only difference for me is that I keep my iTunes music directory on a separate partition (while the main iTunes directory is still on my system partition).
thank you!