Stars

Stars helps you rate the songs in your iTunes library with a system of stars (and even half-stars). Properly rating your songs lets you speed up the process of creating playlists.

For instance, you can play only those tracks rated 4 or 5 stars.

When a song is being played, the application shows its rating on the Menu Bar. In case a track has not been rated before, you can get a reminder to do it. Moreover, you can click on the app’s icon there to access its window, which allows you to control playback with the usual Play, Pause, Next and Previous buttons. Likewise, it shows the artwork for the current song.

One of the main advantages of this utility is that it is quite unobtrusive, so it will not interfere with other activities, not even listening to music. In this regard, it is great that you can use keyboard shortcuts to modify the current rating of a song without ever needing to open its window. However, the way it shows album cover’s is not as discreet. In this respect, I wish it were possible to change its size with the possibility of the app remembering my settings for the next session.

All in all, Stars provides a straightforward and unobtrusive way of rating iTunes songs. Unfortunately, it does not seem to get along well with the latest versions of macOS: it crashes on Mojave and may be useless on Catalina.