I’m increasingly relying on ratings for my iTunes playlists. Setting up smart playlists that just include four and five star music make it really easy to get your favorite music on an iTunes Match enabled iOS device. The trouble is I don’t have time to go hunting down unrated albums and when I do, I tend to spend way too much time fiddling with iTunes. Instead, I’ve created an “Unrated Jazz” smart playlist that looks like this.

I’ve got several Jazz Genres including Cool, Bebop, Classic, Contemporary, Vocal, and more. They all have the word “Jazz” in their genre so this smart playlist pulls from them all.

I’ll load this up in iTunes and then open the I Love Stars app that puts a rating doo-dad in my menu bar. I can start playing this smart playlist then and rate the songs as I work. Once I rate a song, it dissapears from the list and stops playing. I’ve then got to hit the play button on my keyboard or in I Love Stars to get the next song started.

I’ve been doing this for about a month and it is working. I’m getting through my jazz library without spending a lot of time fiddling. Moreover my other smart playlists built on ratings are getting a little better every day. Once this is done I am going to alter the list to attack some of my other favorite genres.