What the heck is a 5-star song anyway? And if a song is bad enough to rate only 1 star, why didn’t you delete it from your hard drive ages ago? My favorite songs are the ones that fit the mood I’m in right now; whenever right now happens to be. Music is an emotional experience intimately connected to remembering the drive up the California coast two summers ago or the anxious anticipation of asking your first girlfriend to dance, not a USA Today rating system from bad to great. The companies making software media players seem to have forgotten this. RealPlayer and iTunes don’t have any connection to emotion in their playlists. Apple’s excuse may be that the same people who are too stupid to use a two-button mouse are also to emotionally inept to build a playlist based on mood. Microsoft pays lip service to the idea of emotion based playlisting with a Mood drop down list in the Advanced Tag Editor hidden in Windows Media Player 10, but their Auto Playlists are all pre-populated with 4 and 5-star ratings. Until somebody actually gets this whole connection between music and emotion, I’ve come up with a workaround in Windows Media Player to help create the perfect playlists to express your feelings, whether you’re happy, sad, angry, pensive or nostalgic for lost summers.