iTunes is probably one of the best music managers available but it could stand for some improvement. One such advancement would the be the inclusion of half-stars. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wrestled with rating a song that just isn’t quite a four star but really isn’t as bad as a three star would project. Same goes for songs that aren’t the best, but don’t really suck like the two star rating would shout. Ugh, how I wished Apple could learn from the movie ratings in the papers.

Guess what? Looks Apple has had it all along. Some snooping hackers found that Apple is actually using a 1-to-100 based rating system. 20, 40, 60, etc. each represent 1, 2, and 3, respectfully, and thus find something in the middle and you’ll get a half-star. So if that 2.5 is needed, give it a 50 and thus 2 stars and a 1/2 shows up in your My Rating column! Happy, happy, joy, joy!

So how do you get this magic number to work? Well, head over to Mac OS X Hints’s forum and follow the links. A few people have some great little AppleScripts to help getting just a bit of that star in your rating column. Of course since this is an AppleScript hack, Windows users are forced to envy.

It’s not clear if this works on earlier versions of iTunes (6.0.1 and earlier) or on the iPod itself, but the half-star does appear in both Windows and Mac versions of iTunes. The half-star does not show in the Info window, however.

Tags: itunes, hack, half-star, applescript