BWare

Apple implemented a new feature which derives an “album rating” from the ratings that you give individual songs. However, they did this in the most brain dead way possible – if you rate any song with any stars, the whole album gets that rating. Then any playlist based on ratings will have the whole album on it. Because no one in the history of recorded music has ever liked just one song on an album. And one-hit wonders are such not a thing that there’s not even a name for them like “one-hit wonder.”

It really goes south when you do something like download the completely free and legal torrent of collections of demo songs from bands playing at SXSW. Which are released every year. It’s a good way to find new music. I have literally gigabytes of music from the SXSW torrents. However, now, if I like even one of those songs, all the songs from that year, all 1300 of them, now show up in the Rated playlist, because Apple’s stupid Album Rating algorithm treats a stupidly derived automatic rating the same as a rating that you actually gave to the song because you liked it enough to click on it.

Just try to fix it, also. Can’t be done. If you try to erase the Album Rating, or change it to “none”, the algorithm immediately changes it right back, with lots of spinning beach ball of death, because it’s trying to do it on 1300 songs at once.

Fucking idiots. Thanks for fucking up my carefully curated playlists. It’s like no one at Apple has ever used a playlist based on ratings. Oh wait, I’m pretty sure they invented them. Maybe they’re all using Zunes.