Okay, I admit, I love tidy playlists and try to keep my iTunes track ratings quite accurate, so that I can always enjoy my intelligent playlists. There has been a tool called iTunesRatings by Matthew Handley, which disappeared some years ago. Because I think this was a very nice application, I spent some hours programming my own app, which has some improvements:

Features:
· See the rating of the current track
· Edit the rating of the current track
· Supports 1/2 stars (eg. 4.5 stars) by clicking & dragging
· Context Menu with the most important iTunes control (Play/Pause, Previous/Next, Loop One)
· Floating Cover Panel
· Quick Playlist and Track Access
· Option to autostart at login
· Option to hide the Menu Bar icon when iTunes isn’t launched
· Designed to use as less resources & processing power as possible! 
· GPL-licensed (free & open source!)
· Runs on Mac OS X 10.5. (Leopard) or 10.6. (Snow Leopard) / Universal Binary /

RateMe! compared:

I noticed that a bunch of similar programs has been released lately – needless to say, that those that need an extra click to rate aren’t that useful (you could right click on the iTunes Dock-icon as well). Most of them don’t support half star ratings, and many are so overloaded with features that they consequently need too much processing power for my taste, thus slowing down the computer.

RateMe! has been designed to use as little CPU as possible. To reduce the number of AppleScripts, I’m using the iTunes Cocoa-based notification system. I checked for Memory Leaks and kept an eye on RAM usage. And I keep an eye on usability, so there are enough features to make this application useful and less enough to keep it simple and lightweight. 

And finally RateMe! is -AFAIK- the only one that’s open source!

System Requirements:
· Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6. (Snow Leopard)
· iTunes 7

Download:
· RateMe! v0.2.3 (Universal Binary for OS X 10.5./10.6.)

· RateMe! v0.2.3 source (for OS X 10.6 Leopard – developers only, normal users please download the above binary!)

Installation & Usage
· Download and unzip
· Move “RateMe.app” to your programs folder
· Double-click to start
· Exit “RateMe!” by right-clicking and selecting “Quit RateMe!”
· If you want “RateMe” to start automatically with Mac OS X, right-click and select “Preferences > Autostart at Login”.
· Note: Rating is disabled when iTunes is paused!
· To rate full stars click on the star; to rate half stars click and drag

Original Timestamp of this post was 2008 March 07