I’m having a problem with podcasts in iTunes. Here’s how it seems to work:
- I listen to a few episodes of a podcast, rating them as I go. (I use the 2-star rating to mark podcasts for deletion once I’ve listened to them. I use higher star ratings for podcasts I want to keep.)
- Once I’ve rated a few (I’m not sure how many), iTunes seems to give the podcast’s “album” a default average rating. This is shown via hollow stars, as opposed to the filled stars for user-assigned ratings.
- This rating gets assigned to all episodes of that podcast, which means:
- Episodes of this podcast no longer show up in my “unrated” smart playlist
- If the automatic average rating is two stars, episodes of this podcast show up in my “To delete” list.
Is there any way to stop iTunes doing this auto-rating? Maybe a plist setting or something?
Best Answer
I have been having this problem and while I don't use the rating quite the way you do, I get annoyed when new episodes are automatically assigned a rating.
I found this solution tonight for iTunes 12.5.1. I selected the podcast which was getting auto assigned (2 stars in my case). It's a very frequently updated podcast as episodes are short. I set View->View As->List. In the upper right corner there is a circle with three dots across the middle. Click on that and the rating option appears. I set the default back to no rating and all the hollow star auto ratings went away, even for episodes I was finished listening to.