iRank
... is a Mac OS X dashboard widget for ranking your iTunes music in more ways than just generic "goodness". You can choose what attributes you want to rate, and you can use these in iTunes smart lists.
Because it's not widely used besides myself, I haven't put the effort in to make it super-easy to use. So here are some quick instructions:
Changing the rank criteria:
- After unzipping, right click on the extracted widget bundle
- Select "Show package contents"
- Open up "iRank.js" in a text editor (TextEdit will do)
- Modify the second line. For example, if you just wanted to have your iTunes rating rating and "Coolness", it would look like this:
new Array("My Rating", "Coolness");
Using rankings in smart playlists
I must admit, I am entirely dissatisfied with the current solution. But as far as I can tell, there is no way around it since iTunes doesn't allow other applications to hook into its smart playlist functionality.
iRank uses the comment field of the track. For a given attribute, the comment will contain [attribue=value]. If the value is zero, the comment will not contain that attribute.
Using this, you can create your own "helper" playlists with meaningful names. For example:
- Mood > 2
- Match ANY of:
- Comment contains [Mood=3]
- Comment contains [Mood=4]
- Comment contains [Mood=5]
- Mood = 0
- Match ALL of:
- Comment does not contain [Mood=
Finally, you can combine these rules in a meaningful smart playlist. For example, My "Fun" smart playlist has the following rules:
- Match ALL of the following:
- Rating is greater than 2
- Playlist is "Mood > 3"
- Playlist is not "Hardcore > 2"
- Playlist is not "Softness > 3"
This basically gets me good songs (Rating > 3) that are cheerful (Mood > 3) which are neither too heavy-metal (Hardcore < 3) nor too soft and slow (Softness < 4)
If you're still keen, Download it!