"I Love Stars" is my new freebie application that shows the rating of iTunes' currently playing song in the menu bar. Before I say anything else, here's the download link.
I spent a good part of yesterday solving a problem that's been bugging me. That is, how to rate songs in iTunes with as few brain cycles as possible.
You tend to get distracted switching back and forth from iTunes and even rating songs with iTunes' dock menu is not fast enough when your hands are on the keyboard. Apps like QuickSilver and CoverSutra already solve a big chunk of the problem by letting you assign keyboard shortcuts for raising and lowering ratings—I have command-option-control-up and down arrow set to raise and lower the rating, for example —but I needed a way to quickly see what the rating actually is before changing it.
If you cringe at the thought of having unrated songs in the library like I do, you'll enjoy I Love Stars. Mainly, it's there to show the rating, but you can adjust it with the mouse as well.
Here is what you'll get once you launch I Love Stars:
To quit, right click for the menu:
If you want I Love Stars to launch at boot up, go to System Preferences, Accounts, then Login Items and add it to the list.
I Love Stars is completely free (as in beer), but if you are a music lover, check out my commercial application Tangerine! too.
Thanks to Steve Harris for sharing the rating control code.
2.0 UPDATE:
I think I'm having too much fun working on this little app. I found myself giggling like a schoolgirl a few times today. In what might go down in the history books as the fastest release of a 2.0 version, a day after the initial launch, the sequel is ready already.
The new version features 150% more features:
- I Love Stars hides itself when iTunes is not playing
- It does so with a nifty animation
- You can assign half a star rating by clicking on the last star
- It is smaller and requires less memory
- 1 bug has been fixed
Here is a short demo of version 2:
Thanks to people who sent in suggestions. Enjoy.
2.1 UPDATE:
- Hide when playing podcasts
- Correctly show album ratings
- Accept input from scroll wheel for rating songs
- Slow-mo animation when shift key is held down
3.0 UPDATE:
- Alert on unrated songs
- Custom keyboard shortcuts for changing the rating
- New preferences window to customize above new features
- Minor bug and memory leak fixes
Comments
Hi Andy,
I downloaded this and already put it as a Login Item. I like the cocept and will love this product. Thanks!
Perfect! I have tried all the iTunes controls, but they all fell short. All I ever wanted was a quick way to change the song rating. That was all. This is the simplest and most elegant way to complete that task. Thanks for the effort. I sincerely appreciate it.
Great app!! Already downloaded it and hope to finally organize my iTunes library.
Does this require Leopard? I downloaded it and it isn't working for me. Sounds like a great idea. If it doesn't require Leopard and you can help me get it working I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks
I forgot to mention this crucial fact in the post, but yeah, it does require Leopard. There was one piece of technology in Leopard that made life much easier for me.
Thank you very much! I love the app! I love the icon!
On version 1.0, I actually spent more time on the icon than the code. Thanks for expressing your love!
I love.. this app!
I have been waiting for something like this forever. You rock my world.
Fantastic - I've been looking for something that I can just drag my mouse across to rate songs - the only thing lacking is the ability to rate 1/2 stars.
My current app of choice is called Star does allow ratings of 1/2 a star but you have to click and select from a long menu of options - and the company behind it seem to have gone so I suspect it's days are numbered..
If you could add support for 1/2 stars - I know it might require some precise mouse dragging - perhaps clicking on a star could toggle it between full and half or you just have a couple of options in the drop down menu - add and subtract half a star?
Then it would be perfect!
Thank you for the suggestion. Version 2.0 has this feature.
Now it's perfect!
Thanks :)
There is another similar app called Funes, released a few weeks ago. It also stars your iTunes songs but without the stars in the bar but with a smaller icon.
Nice but i would like to rate an entire album...
Sorry, but that is not a goal of this application.
I don't think half stars are supported by iTunes, so it wouldn't really make much sense in this app.
What I would love to see, however, is an option to only display the stars when a song is actually playing, to keep the menubar from becoming too cluttered.
This was actually the most requested feature (with 2 whole requests!). Enjoy version 2.
Great app, if only the stars were a little bigger it would be perfect.
Wow! What an Awesome little app. It's absolutely the best complement to iTunes for us Star obsessed. I have one request Andy Kim! Please will you make it compatible with Tiger, that would be so appreciated....
Sorry, but it'll have to stay Leopard only. This is a free product and I can't justify spending time testing on two OS releases and giving up the technology in Leopard that makes coding this much easier.
I'm so excited about this app! I've waited a long time for a success to iTunesRating (which was never upgraded for Leopard) and it's awesome to see this app -- especially with all the nice flourishes you added! Nice work!
Absolutely beautiful UI, applause! I literally laughed when I saw that the stars actually *twirl* when they exit the menu bar :)
I agree that right clicking for the menu is not standard behavior, but I think left clicking to set the rating is still the correct behavior. The main thing people want to do with this app is to set the rating just as in iTunes. Plus the menu should rarely be used as it's only good for quitting the app anyway. It won't be the end of the world when a user discovers that a left click sets the rating, but it'll be more efficient in subsequent uses.
Great application....... i was wondering if you're suggesting making the same application also for iPhoto, or other Mac apps which utilises stars..
I Love Stars will only work with iTunes. It'll be too confusing otherwise.
This is clearly the most important mac app of the year, and you should submit it for an apple design award if not too late.
Feature requests:
1. click and hold shows menu, in addition to right click
2. alt. slim view using single star and a number
3. make it a menu extra so it can be repositioned via cmd-drag
4. release the code so we can play with it?
Further specs:
item 1:
On mousedown, nothing happens until either:
- a drag occurs; then you star setting the rating by the star being hovered
- a few hundred ms have passed; then you show the menu and no rating change occurs
- the mouse button is released; then you set the rating to the star that was clicked
item 2:
- menu icon is just a star with a number, either inside it or beside it
- rating is set by clicking and dragging sideways in the "air" (like knob buttons in some audio apps)
- rating could also be set by using the scrollwheel over the icon (this could also apply to the current UI)
And that's all. Thanks for a great and well polished app.
I have to say no to the left click hold for menu and the narrow menu icon because I like that it works the same way as in iTunes. If you want a similar app that takes less space in the menu bar, check out Funes.
The scroll wheel is a great idea though. I frequently make my sliders accept scroll wheel input and I can't believe I forgot this time! Version 2.1 has this feature now.
I have no interest in looking into menu extras right now, but maybe I'll see how difficult that is when I work on version 3.
Leave it as is. If people want smaller menu bar icons, there are other tools to accomplish that.
I would love to have it as a menu item for greater flexibility... iStat Menu has accomplished that as a 3rd party developer!
Also I would love an option to disable ratings for podcasts (so that it doesn't show when iTunes is playing podcasts). But I guess I'm in a minority with that request :-/
Thanks for the great app!!
Version 2.1 hides when a podcast is playing. This was annoying me too :)
Wonderful little app! I love it!
One thing I that you hopefully could fix is that stars for albums are displayed when the current playing song doesn't have any stars of its own. That way it looks like I've rated the song already. My suggestion would be for you to either could supress stars for albums completely or include the outline stars seen in iTunes.
Thanks for the great work and for keeping this app a freebie!
Just noticed the same thing that Anders mentioned. I second his opinion in its entirety! :)
Love the app.
@Anders Dahlgren and Jonathan Lang
Thank you for letting me know. Version 2.1 now correctly shows the album rating.
Wow. This app is definitely worthy of five stars. I've gone through two other similar apps: menuBarRating [broken in Leopard] and Stars [slightly obnoxious interface], and this totally blows them out of the water. Thank you!
An unusual, but maybe appealing, feature request:
If the tune I'm listening to is not rated pulse the stars red when it has a minute left to play. This would be a handy reminder that I should rate the tune, and happens when I've had some time to decide what I think of the song.
Even if you don't change another thing, I love your app!
Cheers, Paul
Thanks for the suggestion but I'm hesitant to put in a feature that could be annoying/distracting for a lot of people.
I like the idea. Seems a good way to "force" someone like myself to rate songs. I think there could be various ways as to how to tackle something like this. A gently pulsating glow shouldn't hurt, and I'm sure it could be implemented so you can have the option to not have it glow?
Great app! Loving it at the moment, and am starting to love stars! =P
Love the app. It is spreading virally amongst my friends. However, most of us rate our podcast episodes. I would like to have the stars still appear on podcasts. Why the 2.1 update to take them away?
Most of my smartplaylists are often built on the stars I've rated my podcasts, thus why having the podcasts rated is important to me.
Thanks,
Matthew J McCullough
To disable hiding on podcasts, you can paste the following into Terminal.app:
defaults write com.potionfactory.ILoveStars hideOnPodcasts -bool NO
You rock Andy. That worked superbly. Now the app truly is perfect (for me)!
Fantastic! Thanks for this app.
I was using the first version and occasionally it stopped responding to left clicks and I'm not sure why, either:
1. conflict with Spaces?
2. conflict with MaxMenus, which pops up a list of open applications when I click on an empty part of the menu bar. I disabled that feature in MaxMenus, and download version 2 of I Love Stars - hopefully there's no more conflicts!
Andy, thanks for your app, it is a great piece of software.
I often listen to radio streams. Would it be possible for I Love Stars to hide when playing those like it does when playing podcasts? Rating streams does not make a lot of sense either.
Best regards from Germany,
chris
This is just was I was looking for. Thank you very much :)
Now, is there a way to make this open and close with iTunes automatically? I have two other applications that makes extra features for iTunes that I would like to do the same, is there a stand-alone app that does this?
What I do is just add it to the Login Items in System Preferences and have it running all the time. The app is very lightweight and it hides itself when iTunes is not running only to spring back into action when iTunes is playing a song.
This is an awesome app. I love how subtle and easy to use it is. Good work :)
I came here after the 2.1 release and it has all the great features I want.
May I make the following recommendations regarding half star selections:
* Have a brief delay between the star selection in the menu bar and syncing with the current song (perhaps the same system duration that distinguishes between a double-click and two single clicks). I do a lot of half stars and whenever I double-click to get a half star I get a pause as the iTunes database gets one update and then another.
* If there are no ratings, the click gives the full star rating for the first click. After that have clicks that are within a star rating of the current rating adjust by a half rating. The current behavior only allows for half star ratings that are a half star less than the current rating. So, if you have rated a song 3 stars, if you click on the fourth star the rating goes up half a star. But if you have a song with 3 stars and you click on the fifth star the new rating is 5 stars because you are obviously correcting a star rating as opposed to advancing. Interestingly, this is the behavior when adjusting ratings downward. Now you just have to adjust it so when you click an empty star slot next to a full star it goes up a half star rather than a full star.
Great, minimalist app.
i love this. thanks :)
I love it! Thank you thank you!
export stars with the song file
Nice app. But is it possible to export the stars with the songfile? After reimporting the songs to itunes all the stars have gone. Many Tags are exported and saved with the file, but nostar-rating. Do you know an solution?
I recommend that you look around Apple's iTunes discussion group: http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=149
buggy application.
There is no way to quit the app or manner in which to uninstall it. Is it just a script? SOME information should be provided.
On launch, stars weren't displaying, just the default dimples. Trying to add stars: could only add 4 ro 4 1/2 stars. User feedback in the menu bar was limited to displaying a "1/2", no stars, empty or full, and no more dimples after the first click. iTunes was registering the input, but it's pretty well useless if the only ratings working are 4 and 4.5 and that their display is broken in the menu bar.
Then, a memory leak in I Love Stars ate up over 3G of memory and ground my computer to a halt as it thrashed desperately.
27/08/08 4:30:31 PM com.apple.launchd[117] ([0x0-0x589589].com.potionfactory.ILoveStars[34548]) Exited abnormally: Bus error
%&!?#$!!!
great. now your captcha isn't letting me post this in Safari. Trying Firefox. Unimpressed.
The second screenshot in this blog post shows you how to quit the app. After quitting, you can trash it to uninstall it like most Mac applications.
At the moment I don't have time to track down the problems you mention, so regretfully, I recommend that you just stop using it.
this is an awesome app. simple, yet does it job well. kudos to you !
my suggestions for possible future improvements:
- option to reduce the size (horizontal menu bar space) of the app. sometimes, especially when using on a MacBook where there is only 13" screen, the menubar can get overly cluttered. Maybe add an option as someone else pointed out earlier to display a star with a value inside it to signify the rating for the current song.
- some sort of framework that enables I Love Stars to start together with iTunes and quit with it as well. I use another iTunes helper, GimmeSomeTune, and it has this functionality. You can take a look at it to get what I mean.
nonetheless, this is an awesome app and thanks for providing me with what i absolutely needed !
For what it's worth, I Love Stars will be getting a very positive review from me in MacFormat 201 (the UK's leading Mac mag), but I do have a feature request: any chance of _optionally_ making it so the track and artist can be displayed in the menu bar? I'm currently using iTunesMenu for that, but the fewer extras running, the better.
great job. :]
I'd like to suggest some small feature:
- an option to show title/author/album when a new song is starting, maybe via growl or so.
- an option for alternative rating, a star half black and half light gray would be nicer than 1/2 imho.
keep up the nice job. :]
Any chance of open-sourcing this so we developer types can customize it to our nefarious whims? Happy to contribute back any fixes/features, of course, I just feel a bit weird showing up and asking for more of your unpaid time when I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself. =)
P.S. The capcha failed for me too on both Safari and Firefox. You might want to take a look at that.
Love this application! I have been looking for something this simple and elegant for a long time... works and looks great. Thank you for creating it and providing it for free.
Hi,
+1 for Benjamin Rister
In the meanwhile, with iTunes 8 albums have ratings too. Any chance the app could be updated to set them too? (eg via opt or shift)
also, captcha thing failing for recent camino nightly too.
I absolutely love this application. I couldn't be happier about it. Perhaps the option to autostart when iTunes starts?
Thanks so much!
CLEARLY the best part about this app is the slow motion effect.
No but really the easy half stars is the best thing about this app.
That is the one reason why i think most people should have this.
(only if they are into music and half stars like i am)
I'll keep it short: thanks for a great app!
This is fantastic! It's exactly what I need when listening to a new CD while surfing the Internet or designing with Adobe apps.
One question: How hard would it be to change the bullet point color? I have a black menu bar, and I managed to get the stars white just fine, but I cannot figure out what to edit for the bullet point color.
Thanks again!
Thanks Ben. You can't change the bullet point color because those are drawn by the app itself and not with an image.
Hi. Great app indeed. Now it can dump CoverSutra, which I have to admit was bothering me by lots of pointless features.
Nice update. I would still like to see an "Always keep to the left" option though. As an aside, the flashing for unrated songs is too quick. Most of the time I miss it. I would prefer if it flashed or pulsed until the end of the song. Some sparkle integration would be cool too.
Hey !
Great app ! Thank you very much.
Alert (Sound) doesnt work for me though
I love "I Love Stars"! Thanks!
Request:
When Increase rating/Decrease rating with keyboard,
i want to choose "Half rating".
I really want to use this program. But I can't. You see, I already use Bowtie even though I am unhappy with it. The only thing missing from this app is Last.fm support. If this app scrobbled the songs I played in iTunes I would use it in a heartbeat.
Right now I use Bowtie because it Scrobbles whatever is playing AND I always have a small window on top of all other apps to rate my songs. The only problem is that it also has little buttons to change songs. I don't need that. I have the aluminum keyboard so I don't need to use the mouse to change tracks even if the iTunes window is closed
Ideally, I need an app that sits in my menu bar and lets me rate songs while it scrobbles to last.fm for me. I could use the last.fm app + i love stars but i hate the idea of having so many apps open at once especially if I have the option of using one app that does the job of several. And god forbid I have 2 apps open and one their functions overlap.
But this app is awesome. I'm not trying to diss it at all. Sorry for being so longwinded too
This is excatly what i want. Thanks for the excellent product.
Great app - although it would be nice if it only runs when iTunes is running.
Nifty little application, fantastic concept and a joy to use.
:D
BTW you probably know, but your application was mentioned in the April 2009 issue of MacFormat UK.
5 stars! :)
If you don't have access to it i could send a picture if you like.
Just found out about this app, it's GREAT!!!! Have you ever thought of adding a scrobbling to Last.fm feature?
Seriously, where do I send money to? I LOVE this app!
I spent hours and hours last night adding ratings. PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE how the app displays the stars in the menubar, the motion effect is cool, the ½ symbol sizes perfectly with the star symbols, the fact that it disappears when not in use is awesome! It never used more than about 14mb of memory all night long, it's the best I've ever had the pleasure of using and I've tried them all.
I would be happy to see scrobbling to Last.fm added, so I can ditch Cover Stream, Cover Sutra and even the last.fm app itself ( all those apps are memory hogs, caching album art and information crap that I don't even care about seeing ). If people need those apps for navigating songs, maybe you could just add 3 more hotkey options, 1.previous song, 2. play/pause, 3.next song.
Also, could you please make I love stars keep to the far left of the menubar at all times?
P.S. - I'm serious about sending money.
Wow, version 3 already--I am still loving this app! So simple and useful.
I have one request: an option to disable half-star ratings. I don't use them.
Oh, and +1 for the ability to keep it on the left side of the menu bar at all times, if that's possible.
And (sorry) one small complaint: the scroll-wheel input is /extremely/ sensitive. I find it difficult to hit the exact rating I want.
thanks for this, it's great. discovering the rightclick-for-menu was one of those great little moments, and seeing the stars roll in and out on pause / play is great.
i'd also love to be able to use the incrementing shortcuts to add by half-stars — this was my favorite feature of Synergy back in the day..
s
I just switched from QuickTunes to the simpler iTunesMenu, which only shows the title/artist of the currently playing song in the menu bar. So I Love Stars is exactly what I was missing with iTunesMenu: ratings!
But since ILS is a greatly built software, with animations and all, I thought that having an application built from you, that would take the place of iTunesMenu giving a nice interface and a little more features would be amazing.
I don't think that it would take much more coding either, you're already up there in the menu bar and you're already pulling informations from iTunes, so what about pulling the title/artist/album infos too?
Also, I don't see any donation link!
I love the features of 3.0, but the functionality is a step backwards from 2.1. For me, 2.1 was rock solid. In 3.0 there seems to be a disconnect between ILS and iTunes. Half the time ILS doesn't show the ratings when I update them from iTunes. Also, ILS has a tendency to roll away as though a podcast was playing even though I've got a song playing. I have hotkeys (non-ILS) to set the integer ratings but I use ILS to set the half-star ratings and a lot of the time ILS has disappeared from the menubar.
The main reason I'm still with 3.0 instead of regressing to 2.1 is the unrated song alert. This is a tremendously cool feature when it works. Unfortunately for me it only works about half the time. Lots of time I get the alert when I have already rated the song and other times I get no alert and the song goes by unrated. But that 1/3 of the time it works gets me ratings that I would have missed.
Again, I think the disconnect is between ILS checking the ratings (and perhaps the genre) of the song. ILS 3.0 came out in Dec08 (according to the app creation date) and iTunes 8.1 has come out since then, so there may be some functionality broken with the later version of iTunes.
Unfortunately, the fact ILS was recently reviewed in Macworld Gems and the lack of comments since then leads me to believe my issues are an outlier and this works fine for most people.
Mac OS X 10.5.6, iTunes 8.1.1, ILS 3.0
Very nice!
One feature I'd like to request: there used to be a Konfabulator widget for rating songs, and you could set it so that if you gave a song a certain low rating it'd automatically jump to the next song. I would love that!
I'd also like it if the flashing for unrated songs happened, but subtly, through the whole song. That one little flash near the end has very little chance of catching my eye (and I disabled the sound without trying it; unexpected sounds make me jump out of my skin, and that gets messy.) For me, the best solution would be if the five dots pulsated in size or maybe animated side to side--even if you just made an option-8 bullet scroll back and forth, that would work. Any kind of movement would do the trick.
I ADORE the tumbling stars, by the way.
+1 for a Preferences option to disable half stars. I don't use them either since they are not supported by iPods anyway.
And yeah, the flash notifications are a great idea, but they need some more work. I personally would like a flash at the start of the song and a flash near the end. And they don't work reliably yet.
Otherwise, I LOVE I Love Stars!
Does this work on Windows?
I really like I love Stars, but one cannot assign a keyboard shortcut for rating the currently playing song with zero stars. No biggie though, wouldn't use it anyway. Just thiking ;)
Thank you so much for a great little application. The alert is a real godsend.
3.0 has a bug in the developer's preview of Snow Leopard. It keeps iTunes awake by restarting it whenever you quit iTunes. The only way to stop iTunes is to force quit it or quit I Love Stars first. Please fix. Thank for developing a great widget I use everyday.
Thank you so much for the nice app.
Most of the time the Alert dosen't work. Do you think you can find the problem and fix it?
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