iTunes and half-star ratings

Some time ago, I discovered that you could enable half-star ratings in iTunes with a simple Terminal command1:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Ever since I enabled that, I’ve been happily half-starring items.  When your music library runs to well over 40k songs, there is a difference between a five-star song, a four-and-a-half-star song, and a four-star song.

But then, sometime after I upgraded to Mountain Lion on my work computer, I noticed that all of my half-stars were gone.  My heart skipped a beat: I’d put a fair amount of work into rating those songs, and the idea of having to go back through and re-doing it made me quite cranky.  But I love my half-stars, so I quit iTunes, ran that Terminal command again, and re-launched it.

And then, I discovered that all of my half-star ratings were back.  Apparently those half-stars weren’t lost, they were just truncated when the correct bit wasn’t flipped.  Which means I can stop flipping out.

So, if you ever find yourself in my boat, try re-enabling half-stars with the Terminal command above, and see if iTunes does the right thing.  I hope it does.

  1. A tip of the hat to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for the original tip.

One thought on “iTunes and half-star ratings”

  1. Any idea how to do this in Windows? I used to be able to use the following method-

    1. Go to %appdata%\Apple Computer\iTunes folder.
    2. Open iTunesPrefs.xml in notepad or other text editor.
    3. Scroll near to the bottom of the file and add the following lines above the last second tag.
    storefront
    143441-1,12

    This doesn’t work for me anymore:(

    Thanks!

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