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Reach for the Rating Stars in iOS 10
Q. I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 10 and can’t find the controls to give one- to five-star ratings to songs in the Apple Music app. Is this feature gone?
A. In the current version of Apple’s Music app for iOS 10, the multistar rating system has indeed been replaced by a simple binary choice of “Love” or “Dislike.” (You can see those two buttons by tapping the three-dot menu icon in the lower-right corner of a song’s Now Playing screen.)
For those who want a more nuanced system of classification — or who spent years applying a precise amount of stars to each track in their music library for better results with the Smart Playlists feature in iTunes — the new rating system may be infuriating. (At least one person was upset enough to start an online petition at Change.org demanding the return of the star ratings in iOS 10.)
While the star ratings were removed from the Music app’s Now Playing screen, there are still a few ways to rank your songs the old way. For one, when the song is playing, you can tell Siri to add the stars, as in “Rate this song four stars” or whatever you think the track deserves.
If you prefer a quieter method of ranking your tracks — and still sync your music library manually with iTunes on your computer — the 99-cent Music Rating Widget app allows you to apply star ratings to songs from the iOS Notification screen. However, the app does not work with songs from the Apple Music streaming service or the iCloud Music Library. Similar apps designed to provide star ratings can also be found in the App Store.
You can also switch to a different music-player app, like Cesium (99 cents with in-app purchases). In addition to providing a new user interface for playing songs, you can add star ratings to your tracks that sync back to the iTunes library on your computer.
Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to techtip@nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.
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