Star spangled ratings

How do you rate your personal music collection in applications such as iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp?

They all offer up the usual 5 star system with 5 being better than 1. None though actually specify that 1 is bad and 5 is brilliant. They just present the 5 stars and let you choose. 1 could just as well be middling and 5 rather good.

Last night I switched over to iTunes as my main media player and began the fun task of re-rating all my songs as they played. It struck me then that 5 stars as usually used does not offer much of a gradient for good music. In my previous media player I treated 1 star songs as unlistenable garbage and 5 as "play it again, Sam".

How then do you rate Thank You by Alanis, A Horse With No Name by America, Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles and Song 2 by Blur? They are all great tracks but, sorry Alanis, Thank You is no Song 2 which is no Eleanor Rigby which means Alanis gets a 3, Blur a 4 and The Beatles a 5. Except that Thank You deserves more than a 3 if it means "average" (1 being "poor" and 5 being "great").

I then had an interesting thought; I don't want 1 star songs in my library. A poor song gets deleted from my library. So the 1 star and 2 star feature becomes pretty useless as anything assigned either is invariably deleted. 3 starers barely survive by virtue of being "a cheesy but fun song."

So I decided that 1 star is "cheesy but fun", 2 stars is average, 3 stars is good, 4 stars is great and 5 stars is effing brilliant.

This lets me have a finer grain of control over my ratings all within the 5 star system. It does still feel strange selecting 3 star songs for a good listening playlist.

Of course it presents problems when this data gets out into the open of other systems where 1 is poor. But so far in 7 years of computing nobody has come up with a way for ratings to get spread around the internet through your desktop media player.