Our previous iTunes tip for creating playlists involved manually tagging each song you listen to based on the mood you feel it represents. If you're too lazy for that, maybe you'd prefer AutoRate. The concept of Autorate is simple; look at your listening habits, and rate your iTunes / iPod music based on how often you listen to a song, and how often you skip it.

While we tend to be way too control-freaky to use an approach like this to rate our entire playlist, we did test it on small subsets (albums that hadn't previously been rated), and it's surprisingly good in that context. It's unclear how well it would work on a very large music library where many songs rarely ever play, but for specific applications like rating specific albums it works quite well, although you do have to manually create a playlist of all of the songs on the album first.

AutoRate is a free Mac download.