I Love Stars - Rate Your Favorite iTunes Music with a Single Click!

I really like iTunes. I know that it's among the most widely used music players in the world today, but as much as it's liked, it's probably among the most despised. I don't really see it myself, but I know a lot of people feel it's bloated, too heavy for a simple media player, and there are certain aspects of it that just don't agree with many people.

As I said, I like iTunes, and yet there are definitely some features that I never use. I've never really used iTunes as a Podcast tool. Sure, it has probably the best catalog of Podcasts available, and I know that it apparently does a nice job of downloading and managing them, but I just haven't found a Podcast I want to listen to each and every time. I'd rather just download the episodes I'm interested in. So the Podcast feature, again, almost always gets turned off. Similarly, I'm not a playlist kind of guy, and Internet Radio isn't really my thing either. Similarly, before today, I'd never given a star rating to any song in my iTunes library. In fact, that - along with the Play Count - is among the first features I turn off when I install iTunes.

But I just said "before today," because today I tried out a free utility called "I Love Stars" which is brought to you by The Potion Factory, also the makers of Voice Candy and Tangerine (both of which I've reviewed in the past). What I Love Stars hopes to accomplish for me and other users is to provide an easy way to star all your favorite songs, right as you're listening to them.

It does this by placing a small lineup of five stars in your Mac's menu bar. As you're listening to your music in iTunes, you can click on the number of stars you'd like to give that song, and instantly, that star rating is visible in iTunes. It's that easy!