This is my rating system for regular, studio recordings:

: 1 star represents a terrible, terrible song. Normally, these are deleted but they might be saved only for the sake of completing an album.

: 2 stars is for a song that basically sucks. It is not uncommon to have a 2 star-rated song in every album, even by my favorite artists.

: 3 stars is my baseline average rating. This would be for a song that is okay, not especially good, but fine to listen to. I've got lots o' 3 star songs.

: 4 star ratings are for songs that I really like. These are tracks that I would consider to be my favorite songs. I've got quite a few 4 star tracks.

: 5 star ratings represent a song that speaks to my soul. It defines a moment in my life, or represents an emotion, or makes a connection to my being. I don't have very many 5 star songs.

Okay, now that you understand that, I can go on. Like I said, I really like live music and I've got quite a bit of it on my music drive. It's great to listen to in order to really get a feel for what an artist is like, hear them talk, interact with the audience, etc. To make it even better, downloading live music is usually legal (as far as I know) and even some bands will offer live tracks to download from their web site. The only drawback is that sometimes the recording quality can be pretty rough. A poor, quiet, or muffled recording can detract from the enjoyment of listening to the show. That is why I've developed a different rating system for live music in my iTunes library. For every track that is sourced live I do two things differently:

1) I append the word "Live-" to the beginning of the album data slot of the ID3 tag. I can easily exclude these tracks from a Smart Playlist if I want to by adding the selector, "Album does not include 'Live-'". I will also usually put the particular show's location and date in the album information, for example, "Live-Big Day Out Festival, Sydney, 1/24/04". I will also append the year to the Year slot of the ID3 tag information as well. If I do not have the show or date information then I will just put some unique identifier in the album information in order to identify and group this particular show, for example, "Live-Box of Birds tour" or "Live-France?"

2) My usage of the star rating changes. No longer do I use it to rate how much I like the song, I now use it to rate the sound quality of the live recording. I'm picky about sound quality and I will listen to a well-recorded show a lot more often than a poorly recorded show. So, after I determine the sound quality (1 star being the lowest and 5 stars being the highest), I will simply select all of the tracks in that show and give them all the same rating.

There is one adjustment that I'm considering making to this system. That is to begin the album name of every live track with a character that forces it to move to the bottom in the sort order, that way it is separated from the band's studio discography when sorting by album name.