Kyle Week: Quick Tech Tip – Half Stars in iTunes

There is something strangely satisfying about rating a song in iTunes. Sort of like a private, people’s choice award – without the Red Carpet. The only problem is deciding how to rank those in-between songs. You know, a song that deserves more than 4 stars, but is not quite worthy of 5 stars? Serious dilemma, right? Not any more.

Here is how you can tweak your iTunes to allow for ‘half-star’ rankings (it might look more technical/intimidating than it really is):

For Windows Vista:

• Close out iTunes.
• Open your Start Menu and type iTunesPrefs.xml into the ‘Search’ field and hit enter. A new window will open up and you should see a matching search result.
• Copy the iTunesPrefs.xml file and paste it to your desktop – just so you have a clean copy if things get messed up.
• Return to the open window and right click the iTunesPrefs.xml file and highlight the ‘Open With’ menu option. When the submenu pops up, choose WordPad to open the file.
• Once open in WordPad, search the .xml file (ctrl f) for the following line:

• Below this line, but above the next line, type

• Save the WordPad file and close it out.
• Open iTunes and start giving those in-between songs the love they deserve.
• Once the half-stars are enabled, you can delete the iTunesPrefs.xml copy you placed on your desktop.

For Mac:

• Close iTunes
• Open Terminal (go to ‘Applications’, then ‘Utilities’)
• With Terminal open, type in the following command and press enter

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

• Open iTunes and test it out.

End Result: