Song ratings are one of the best ways to organize your music and podcast collection. In fact, they’re the only way to organize your collection if you want to use your iPod as a control device, because ratings are the only song data you can set on-the-fly.

The trick is not to think of 5 stars as necessarily “better” than 3 stars; more importantly, the number of stars can be used as a categorization. I have an extensive system I use, which I’ll document in another post. For now, a trick you can use with iTunes DJ (known until yesterday as Party Shuffle) to improve an iTunes bad behavior.

One of the ways I keep track of which songs I’ve recently added to iTunes is that they have no rating. So I have an “Inbox Sampler” playlist which, among other things, shows me unrated songs so I can decide what to do with them. The problem is that if you’re listening to this playlist and you decide to actually rate a song, it disappears from the playlist and the music stops playing. It’s a bit disruptive to the workflow when the music stops.

The winning alternative: set iTunes DJ or Party Shuffle to use the Smart Playlist as the source. You can then set ratings as you wish, with no interruption.