What do iTunes star ratings mean to you?

Rating things on a five-point scale is never easy, yet it's a system convenient enough that film critics, wine connoisseurs, and Rolling Stones all over the world use it. Here's what I mean when I rate songs in iTunes (this also applies to rating photos in iPhoto and similar systems):

[no rating]    I never got around to rating this song, or I haven't made up my mind yet. This should be looked into.

There is something wrong with this song. It's terrible, or the file is broken, or the tags are wrong, or it's some 45-minute experimental piece. In any case, I don't want it to shuffle on or show up in my playlists and I should look into why it's in my library at all.

This is a bearable song. I don't hate it; if it comes on, I'll likely skip it, but it's basically earned its stay in my music library.

This is a good song. I want to hear it here and there even if it's not exactly a favorite.

This song is sweet. I want to hear it frequently and it's very unlikely that I'll skip it or remove it. (Note: songs often flip between three and four stars)

This is a classic. It's either a masterpiece or a track very dear to me. I want to hear it, but careful with it - it may play too often. This should be used sparingly.

Why there won't be a red Mac

Almost as soon as the new red iPod was announced, rumors started spreading of other possible product(red) products (in red). Here's why I'm willing to bet my hat that a red iMac, Mac mini, or MacBook will never happen:

AppleInsider MacBook RED poll, with a mock-up

And another one, found via Google.

That thing looks absolutely scary. Both the MacBook's plastic and the MacBook Pro's aluminum would just look very off in red. They're also simply far too big for all that saturated color; a 15" object won't look candybar no matter how you paint it.

Tangerine awakening

Tangerine is a trendy new Mac app with a simple and useful premise: generate "mood-based" iTunes playlists. This is done by analyzing the iTunes library and picking songs in the user-selected BPM and intensity ranges. If I want a rock-out or exercise playlist, I pick high BPMs and intense beats; for chill-out time, I would pick the opposite.

Most non-Mac users will mock our appreciation of nice application icons, but I honestly don't care - let me profess my love for the Tangerine icon here and now. It's superb. The app itself looks pretty swanky too, though for my taste, it mimics too many iTunes features I might as well use in iTunes (if Tangerine were, say, a plug-in instead of a standalone app). But that's not really a complaint, just a side note.

Analysis of my 3,800-song library took about an hour and a half on a PowerBook G4. That's not stellar, but it's also not like I needed that punk playlist immediately. After this I went to create my first playlist - something fast and intense, my weapon of choice for dishwashing, dusting, and other household chores. I went for a BPM range of 130-200bpm and above-average intensity. I was surprised to find only these two settings (including a distribution curve).

The results were sorely disappointing. Included were a number of scratchy 1930s jazz cuts, and some of the mellowest tracks by Tricky, Can, and Beck (trust me, they were pretty darn mellow). I pushed both the BPM and the intensity up and got similar results - while some of the tracks were what I would put in the "fast and intense" category using my cerebral analyzer, they made up 10-20% of the generated mix.

Just about the only way I was able to create playlists that matched my expectations of fast/slow and mellow/intense was by picking from one of my carefully assembled iTunes Smart playlists. Which had me wondering why I was using Tangerine at all - a quick comparison of purely random iTunes lists using a somewhat selective playlist and Tangerine playlists seeded from the same pool with the added BPM and intensity revealed no appreciable difference between the two.

Maybe I was doing something wrong. Or maybe my music library is wacky somehow. In any case I found that Tangerine, while pleasant to use, did next to nothing for me - and not because I'm not in its target market. I have dozens of Smart playlists I regularly use. They were one of the things that impressed me the most about iTunes.

Sorry, you sexy citrus - maybe next time.