Old request, still desired, to avoid trashing playlists:
Allow Rating Stars clicks to be disabled, or require click+Enter, or similar confirmation. Because now, it's too easy. A song or photo Rating can be changed with a single click on a Star, an inadvertent single click, unlike all the other tags that require actual typing or scrolling or other explicit action.
In my family, songs and photos would constantly disappear, or get wrongly added, because someone clicking on the interface "touched" a star, didn't mean to, but BAM, the Rating was changed. No warning, no way to identify which tracks/photos got re-Rated. That's highly risky for no good reason.
Rating is primarily a way to select items for playlists, yet because it is so easy to change unintentionally, I've had songs/photos totally disappear until, months later, the change was noticed. Eventually I had to abandon the standard Rating field because of its vulnerability.
My workaround in recent years is a custom field of values 1 to 5. But if MC allowed disabling or confirmation of Rating changes via Stars clicks, I wouldn't need this workaround.
I see evidence of this vulnerability all over my MC libraries -- Thousands of files (audio tracks, photos, videos) have Star values, but I NEVER explicitly do
that (using my own custom field instead). That so many Star values exist shows how often users have clicked and changed the Rating value, and since it's a system used by just my family, who knows how to use MC (coming up on 15 years!), I'm confident it was never done intentionally. It's an accident that keeps happening.
If Stars clicks can't require confirmation, then please allow Stars display to be read-only, and require that the actual Rating field number be edited to actually change the value -- just like all the other fields. Please.
And, fixing this could be a chance to support half-stars that many have requested, by allowing decimal values that map to full and half stars (round to n.0 or n.5).
Note that I don't actually need half stars, though I'd like the ability to use negative values. I use -1 as a value in my custom field, to indicate the same file from a different source that should be ignored by smartlists. Details: When I have 5 copies of the same music track, identical except for source (on 3 CDs, 2 vinyl rips), I don't want to hear it 5 times more often, but it's not valid to rate any of the identical recordings poorly, so instead I use -1 for four of them.
