How do I stop iTunes from automatically assigning a hollow star rating to podcasts? I’m having a problem with podcasts in iTunes. Here’s how it seems to work:


I listen to a few episodes of a podcast, rating them as I go. (I use the 2-star rating to mark podcasts for deletion once I’ve listened to them. I use higher star ratings for podcasts I want to keep.)
Once I’ve rated a few (I’m not sure how many), iTunes seems to give the podcast’s “album” a default average rating. This is shown via hollow stars, as opposed to the filled stars for user-assigned ratings.
This rating gets assigned to all episodes of that podcast, which means:

Episodes of this podcast no longer show up in my “unrated” smart playlist
If the automatic average rating is two stars, episodes of this podcast show up in my “To delete” list.



Is there any way to stop iTunes doing this auto-rating? Maybe a plist setting or something?
I'm not aware of any way to turn this off. Perhaps you could work around this issue by giving the podcast "album" a rating of 3 stars?

Then your smart playlist for delete could check for 2 star rating. Your smart playlist for "unreated" would check for 3 star rating. Your smart playlist for "keeper" could be 4+ stars…