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I have been rating songs for a VERY long time, have several playlists using star ratings, etc.
You used to be able to click on an album and 'flip' it in iOS and could see the ratings of your music. This seems to be completely gone, and only have the option to 'heart' the item. Is there a way to edit the star rating of a song on iOS 8.4?
There are a couple of potential solutions to this problem. I say potential because everyone's listening habits and needs are different, so your mileage may vary. Here goes:
The Smart Playlist problem is not new, and certainly not unique in your case. There seems to be an overall problem with Smart Playlist syncing through iTunes Match (1) across different devices, (2) with any expediency (usually takes >= 48 hours), and (3) with respect to honoring certain rules (e.g., number of songs allowed). Another common theme seems to be that "nested" playlists cause even more of a problem than standard Smart Playlists. Nested lists are those that are created when you use your option key to turn the + into an ellipsis (...), which creates a sub-rule for your master rule.
Solution 1: Dumb it down
Create a standard playlist (Dumb) and give it the same name as your Smart playlist. Copy the content from Smart to Dumb. Sync your device, computer, whatever. Rinse, wash, repeat for each Smart Playlist you want to have properly represented on your other devices. This works.
Solution 2: Really Dumb it Down
Do your best to avoid the aforementioned nested playlists. This may require you to build several smaller smart playlists with limited criteria. Not the easiest workaround, but we're going for functionality here, right?
Solution 3: Really make your "Recently Added" folder songs that are "Recently Added"
For your "Recently Added" folder, tack on just one more rule to force songs added after a date, rather than only within the last two weeks (see pic below)
So, I hope this gets you at least a little closer to your goal. I tried to add as much info as I could here since, one more time: everyone's listening and categorizing habits are different :-)
You may find other variations on these, but do realize that, at least for now, this is a server-side problem and workarounds like these represent the best available solutions.
This is a bug introduced in iTunes 12.2 at the end of June. It appears that iTunes has done some sort of averaging of track ratings and written them as album ratings overwriting the original per-track ratings.
I've seen this issue with my library of approximately 100,000 tracks and have filed a bug report with Apple in Radar. Removing the album rating data is difficult as iTunes won't reliably show this data in smart playlists and many of the utilities that try to do mass change operations fail when setting this attribute.
The tool I've been using to slowly clean it up is Doug Adam's "Album Rating Reset." This only works on one album at a time, but if you really care about your ratings, you're going to want to clean this up very carefully to avoid damaging any of your remaining per-track ratings.
I should add that I was also able to restore a number of the lost per-track items by restoring a pre-iTunes 12.2 library to a separate user account , confirmed that the ratings will still present and then used the commercial SuperSync utility to transfer the ratings from the old library to my latest 12.2.2 library using the metadata transfer tool.
What a hassel! I hope sharing some of my tools helps you with your carefully crafted library.
Best Answer
No - the controls are moved, though.
Click the song title in the now playing screen, it will change to a set of stars where you can see and change star ratings.