Album ratings and clear stars are ruining my playlists. Help turn them off.

Question

I understand that if you give an album an album rating, it will give all unrated songs on that album clear stars based on the album rating. Because of this, I have not rated any of my albums, since all of my playlists are based off of the song ratings.
All of a sudden, now when I rate a single song, it puts clear stars in the album rating column, and ALSO assigns clear stars for all of the unrated tracks on that album. It is ruining all of my playlists.
Is there any way to turn off the album ratings, or turn off the clear stars, or do something to get rid of this, rather than going through manually and adjusting each song individually?

Answer 1

Is there anyway to make itunes recognize the difference between clear stars and filled stars when making smart playlists? This may work to make things work for me.
If you use "album rating" field in your playlist, it will use the clear stars that appear in that column. If you use "rating" field in your playlist, it should ignore the clear stars that appear in the "album rating" column.
As for an example of how things are not working right now, I have a playlist that is just unrated music, so that if I feel like rating some of the newer songs I added in, I can just load that playlist, and everything in there has no ratings. Now, some of the albums that are mostly unrated are not showing up in that playlist, because instead of all of the unrated songs being blank, they all have clear stars next to them.
When you say "unrated music", what precisely is the rule you use? When I set up a playlist with the rule "Rating is less than '1 star'", even albums with clear stars in the "album rating" field show up (as long as the individual track doesn't bear a rating, obviously). But when I change that rule to say "Album rating is less than '1 star'", then as soon as I rate one song, the entire album is removed from the playlist.
And just to make sure I am being very clear on this, I have NOT used the album rating at all, those stars are clear as well.
Ok, I think this may answer some of the questions in my previous post. I infer that you are seeing clear stars in the "rating" column, not just the "album rating" column. Can you confirm this? If that's the case, then this is truly a mystery. I was hoping the problem was an innocent confusion between the "album rating" and the "rating" columns.