Let me explain a little. There are 5 stars between the length of the song and the artist. These songs have an Auto Rating, which is demonstrated by the darker stars vs. the outlined stars. But, half the songs have an auto rating 4, while the others have an auto rating of 3. The strangest thing is that once I play the song, the auto rating changes from a three to a four, even when unconnected from the Internet.
(Song 15, once played, has the Auto rating changed to 4 stars.)
How does Windows Media Player do this? I've seen this happen for dozens of songs. I'm not completely certain, but it appears to rate the songs in the same fashion. A post on an MSDN forum (http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=36220) offers two possiblities, how many times you listen to a song, or how many times you listen to a song completely. However, neither of these can be the case from my experience. Or, are these ratings from a third party source mentioned in this help article (here).
I recently ripped all of my CDs. I've been listening to some of these songs, all which I've never listened to before. If the auto rating was based off how many times I'd listened to the song, then wouldn't all of the songs I listen to once have the same rating? However, all of the songs had different ratings.
I see two possibilities. The first option is that when the CD data is optained, the ratings are saved, but not displayed until after the song has been played once. Though, I'm not certain why the designers whould chose to display these ratings in this fashion. The other possibility is that there is some sort of AI built into Windows Media Player. I'm not certain what the parameters may be that this function uses to determine what the Auto rating may be, but I know one thing, if it does use AI to determine the Auto rating system, the AI seems to really enjoy Nirvana's Nevermind, giving songs on that CD 4.5 stars.
