getmusicbee.com
Support => Questions => Topic started by: SonicRings on March 13, 2021, 03:58:39 AM
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I'd like to ignore all rating tags that are stored in my music files. How can I disable MusicBee from considering them?
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"Considering them" in what respect? In what way is MB considering your ratings?
You can simply not display ratings and you'll never know they're there.
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"Considering them" in what respect? In what way is MB considering your ratings?
You can simply not display ratings and you'll never know they're there.
Files that have ratings in their tags show their ratings as though I manually rated them in MusicBee, getting mixed in with them all.
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Songs that are rated are songs that are rated regardless of whether you rated them in MB or some other program if the rating is in the file's tags (POPM in MP3, RATING in FLAC I think).
In MB, you can choose to only have ratings stored to the database rather than in the files, but that won't erase ratings that already exist in the files (it may prioritize database ratings over file ratings, though, if you rate an already tag-rated song after setting that. I'm not sure.). But that setting just tells MB how to store future ratings. It doesn't ignore tag ratings you've set in the past.
If you have ratings that you don't want to use any more in song files, you should erase the tags in the files.
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Songs that are rated are songs that are rated regardless of whether you rated them in MB or some other program.
In MB, you can choose to only have ratings stored to the database rather than in the files, but that won't erase ratings that already exist in the files (it may prioritize database ratings over file ratings, though, if you rate an already tag-rated song after setting that. I'm not sure.). But that setting just tells MB how to store future ratings. It doesn't ignore tag ratings you've set in the past.
If you have ratings that you don't want to use any more in song files, you should erase the tags in the files.
I don't want to delete the tags though, I just want musicbee to ignore them. I suppose I should make a wishlist thread about this since it's not currently possible?
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I don't want to delete the tags though, I just want musicbee to ignore them. I suppose I should make a wishlist thread about this since it's not currently possible?
I'll say this with the best intentions, intended in a very friendly manner and as food for thought, and please don't take it otherwise. A large number of posts in the "questions" forum are from new-ish users who complain that MB is unduly complicated and hard for a new user to navigate. I'm not sure that adding a "I have put this data into a specific tag in my files that I find valuable enough to keep, but please ignore it anyway" setting helps with that.
Some things are best handled by the user taking hold of his or her own data management and not expecting MB to account for every user whim.
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I don't want to delete the tags though, I just want musicbee to ignore them. I suppose I should make a wishlist thread about this since it's not currently possible?
I'll say this with the best intentions, intended in a very friendly manner and as food for thought, and please don't take it otherwise. A large number of posts in the "questions" forum are from new-ish users who complain that MB is unduly complicated and hard for a new user to navigate. I'm not sure that adding a "I have put this data into a specific tag in my files that I find valuable enough to keep, but please ignore it anyway" setting helps with that.
Some things are best handled by the user taking hold of his or her own data management and not expecting MB to account for every user whim.
Thank you for your opinion. Your "I have put this data into a specific tag in my files that I find valuable enough to keep, but please ignore it anyway" is spot on. Musicbee already has a setting that you can disable so it DOESN'T save newly rated songs to the tags, so I don't think it's too "whimsical" to expect a setting which offers the opposite effect where it DOESN'T take into account said tags.
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Files that have ratings in their tags show their ratings as though I manually rated them in MusicBee, getting mixed in with them all.
Another, same-y opinion to frankz.
And technical question - how is any program suposed to differentiate between ratings from elsewhere, and from within musicbee ? (since both write to the same metadata field as per the file convention).
Unless you (as the only one who knows which rating is which) mark them in some way, there is no way for MusicBee to differentiate these... and I doubt there's a technical angle under which this could be done. Unless you'd force MusicBee to write its' own ratings elsewhere. But - in that case I'd also agree with frankz:
"Some things are best handled by the user taking hold of his or her own data management" statament.
And you best path would be to shove the rating you do not want to see in musicbee, but still keep, in a different custom metadata field, and musicbee can write to the official ratings field...
c.
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Files that have ratings in their tags show their ratings as though I manually rated them in MusicBee, getting mixed in with them all.
Another, same-y opinion to frankz.
And technical question - how is any program suposed to differentiate between ratings from elsewhere, and from within musicbee ? (since both write to the same metadata field as per the file convention).
Unless you (as the only one who knows which rating is which) mark them in some way, there is no way for MusicBee to differentiate these... and I doubt there's a technical angle under which this could be done. Unless you'd force MusicBee to write its' own ratings elsewhere. But - in that case I'd also agree with frankz:
"Some things are best handled by the user taking hold of his or her own data management" statament.
And you best path would be to shove the rating you do not want to see in musicbee, but still keep, in a different custom metadata field, and musicbee can write to the official ratings field...
c.
In case you weren't aware, I don't allow musicbee to store ratings in the file tags. Any song I rate within musicbee thus does not get stored in the file tags and would therefore be very easy to differentiate from ratings that are from the file tags.
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More food for thought...
In software engineering... design... problem solving... life... a good question to always ask yourself is... am I making things needlessly complicated?
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In software engineering... design... problem solving... life... a good question to always ask yourself is... am I making things needlessly complicated?
Luckily MusicBee has a more than capable developer in exactly this regard.
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More food for thought...
In software engineering... design... problem solving... life... a good question to always ask yourself is... am I making things needlessly complicated?
Is essentially requesting a tag be ignored considered "needlessly complicated"? Consider this: by default, the tag was never considered. Steven had to program MusicBee to take the tag into consideration, as with all tags. It's how MusicBee came to be able to display and interact all the tags music files tend to have, and even what inspired the addition of custom and virtual tags, and their abilities to be saved to the internal database or to music files' tags.
I believe that must have been more complicated than not having considered it in the first place, and therefore I believe it wouldn't be "needlessly complicated" to implement a setting that disregards the tag.
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I believe that must have been more complicated than not having considered it in the first place, and therefore I believe it wouldn't be "needlessly complicated" to implement a setting that disregards the tag.
To me this is about consistency and expected behaviour.
Are you aware of other common tags that exist both in files and in MusicBee's database and are isolated from eachother?
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I believe that must have been more complicated than not having considered it in the first place, and therefore I believe it wouldn't be "needlessly complicated" to implement a setting that disregards the tag.
To me this is about consistency and expected behaviour.
Are you aware of other common tags that exist both in files and in MusicBee's database and are isolated from eachother?
Nothing that comes to mind. However, last-played time, play count, etc. are all internally handled in the database, similar to ratings. I know for a fact musicbee keeps all the ratings I make in musicbee in the internal database because it doesn't write them to the files' tags.
This is why I think it's a good idea if it can be made to ignore the tags altogether when the setting is unchecked: it already ignores them when writing, why then does it still consider them when reading? When I don't save ratings to the files, I expect the files' ratings to not be mixed in with the internal database.
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Following the discussion and after getting a better understanding of the OP's usecase, what is essentially being asked is, for a way to differentiate between rating tags that are stored within the files themselves and rating tags stored in MusicBee's library.
Since MB already intentionally provides a way to store ratings in its library (which some other programs don't) I can see how a way to differentiate between embeded rating tags would make sense and further re-enforce that same usecase.
Making it available as a field (e.g. library rating) would be enough.
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Something I'm seeing upon testing though, is that MB removes any existing embeded track rating tag when you change the rating while the option "store ratings in music file" is disabled. So it's either one or the other, which would make sense for clarity and implementation simplicity (but at the same time pose problems in certain situations).
I initially thought that enabling/disabling "store ratings in music file is disabled" merely changes the precedence of which rating should be displayed (embedded or library stored) but evidently that's not the case.
That might be an issue for you @SonicRings, if you've been doing rating modifications, given that you wanted to preserve the embeded ratings.
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Something I'm seeing upon testing though, is that MB removes any existing embeded track rating tag when you change the rating while the option "store ratings in music file" is disabled. So it's either one or the other, which would make sense for clarity and implementation simplicity (but at the same time pose problems in certain situations).
If it wouldn't do that, how long do you think it would take before users started posting bug reports because 'MusicBee displays a wrong rating, because the Tag Inspector shows a different rating'?
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Something I'm seeing upon testing though, is that MB removes any existing embeded track rating tag when you change the rating while the option "store ratings in music file" is disabled. So it's either one or the other, which would make sense for clarity and implementation simplicity (but at the same time pose problems in certain situations).
If it wouldn't do that, how long do you think it would take before users started posting bug reports because 'MusicBee displays a wrong rating, because the Tag Inspector shows a different rating'?
I'm sure they would if it wasn't adequetly claried in the settings. As I said, it does make sense for clarity reasons.
I mentioned that because it was valueable to the discussion, I'm personally not against the current behaviour.
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I mentioned that because it was valueable to the discussion, I'm personally not against the current behaviour.
I understand that, it was just a good opportunity for me to explain why I think this wish is a bad idea ;-)
If somebody wants to have duplicate ratings for his music, MusicBee already has the possibility to create custom tags for that purpose, and set the fields for those to 'rating'.
(I personally am not sure that feature functions flawlessly b.t.w., but that is a different matter)
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As a concept it probably doesn't make much sense to implement.
But I still trust Steven would had been able to implement it in a way that would be understandable if he were to do it ;-)
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Following the discussion and after getting a better understanding of the OP's usecase, what is essentially being asked is, for a way to differentiate between rating tags that are stored within the files themselves and rating tags stored in MusicBee's library.
Since MB already intentionally provides a way to store ratings in its library (which some other programs don't) I can see how a way to differentiate between embeded rating tags would make sense and further re-enforce that same usecase.
Making it available as a field (e.g. library rating) would be enough.
THANK YOU! Someone finally gets it!
Something I'm seeing upon testing though, is that MB removes any existing embeded track rating tag when you change the rating while the option "store ratings in music file" is disabled. So it's either one or the other, which would make sense for clarity and implementation simplicity (but at the same time pose problems in certain situations).
I initially thought that enabling/disabling "store ratings in music file is disabled" merely changes the precedence of which rating should be displayed (embedded or library stored) but evidently that's not the case.
That might be an issue for you @SonicRings, if you've been doing rating modifications, given that you wanted to preserve the embeded ratings.
Actually I've never had this behaviour. When I change a song's rating within musicbee, its rating tag does not change.
In fact, until my testing right now, tracks I used to re-rate and un-rate that had rating tags would re-acquire their rating from the tag automatically. Now that I'm testing, though, that isn't the case: the rating tag still persists, but the track actually keeps its new rating that I've set within musicbee.
I've tested this with tracks that have RATING tag as well as RATING WMP tag just now and both have given me the same result. Seeing how musicbee isn't re-acquiring the rating from the tag anymore, this is definitely good news for me. I can simply re-rate or un-rate the songs whose rating tags I don't want considered and be on my way. Hopefully they don't randomly re-acquire the ratings in the future.
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THANK YOU! Someone finally gets it!
I'm pretty sure everybody else participating in this thread also 'got it'. Your request is not rocket science.
(even though your intentions why it would be useful were not very well explained in the beginning)
You just don't like the opinions about it.
And you forgot to quote the last remark of the person who you believe is the only one 'who gets it', which was:
"As a concept it probably doesn't make much sense to implement."
So, at this moment there is still nobody who thinks it would be a good idea to get your wish implemented.
Perhaps still nobody is getting it?
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To clarify, after finding out about the behaviour where either one or the other of the tags is kept I thought it would be too much work to implement, for something so niche.
But if it was already able to keep track of both tags then this would be much simpler to implement obviously. As I mentioned before, exposing the "library rating" tag as a seperate field which can then be used by whomever for whatever purpose without polluting existing functionality.
But it's interesting that this is the way it used to work for you before SonicRings, I'm not sure what is going on there. Steven should be able to chime in on that one.
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@SonicRings Just to be sure that we are on the same page. When I tested that I first had the option "store rating in the music file" enabled. That allowed me to change the rating tag embeded in the file. After that, I disabled the option and changed the rating again. That resulted in the embeded rating tag to be removed. I could see the change using the tag inspector.
Are you saying that for you it works or used to work differently at some point?
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THANK YOU! Someone finally gets it!
I'm pretty sure everybody else participating in this thread also 'got it'. Your request is not rocket science.
(even though your intentions why it would be useful were not very well explained in the beginning)
You just don't like the opinions about it.
And you forgot to quote the last remark of the person who you believe is the only one 'who gets it', which was:
"As a concept it probably doesn't make much sense to implement."
So, at this moment there is still nobody who thinks it would be a good idea to get your wish implemented.
Perhaps still nobody is getting it?
I think if there was anyone not getting it, it was you, since after all was said and done, you still didn't understand what I was asking in my previous thread lol.
Look, I get it. You don't agree with my wishlist request. You voted. You've voiced and explained your opinion. You've done your part. Be on your way please. Don't keep bringing things up trying to provoke me. I didn't come here to argue. This serves no purpose other than to circle jerk, which isn't the intent of the forum nor my thread.
While we're still on the topic of having forgotten to "quote the last remark of the person who i believe is the only one 'who gets it'", let me do that:
But I still trust Steven would had been able to implement it in a way that would be understandable if he were to do it ;-)
I agree with this completely. I respect their opinion that it may not make the most sense. However they still believe that, should Steven implement it, he would do so in a manner that would not cause confusion. I believe this as well, because as I suggested, he can make the local database take precedence when the "store ratings in the music file" setting is unchecked. To recap one last time, since I don't allow musicbee to SAVE ratings to tags, I would naturally also expect musicbee to not GET ratings from tags.
Let's put this debate to rest now since I don't see us reaching a conclusion at the current rate.
To clarify, after finding out about the behaviour where either one or the other of the tags is kept I thought it would be too much work to implement, for something so niche.
But if it was already able to keep track of both tags then this would be much simpler to implement obviously. As I mentioned before, exposing the "library rating" tag as a seperate field which can then be used by whomever for whatever purpose without polluting existing functionality.
But it's interesting that this is the way it used to work for you before SonicRings, I'm not sure what is going on there. Steven should be able to chime in on that one.
Yeah, MusicBee clearly keeps track of internally rated tracks separately from the tracks that simply have their ratings stored in the tags. Therefore I think it's completely possible for Steven to allow us to ignore the tags without impacting the internal ratings.
@SonicRings Just to be sure that we are on the same page. When I tested that I first had the option "store rating in the music file" enabled. That allowed me to change the rating tag embeded in the file. After that, I disabled the option and changed the rating again. That resulted in the embeded rating tag to be removed. I could see the change using the tag inspector.
Are you saying that for you it works or used to work differently at some point?
I've never enabled that setting so it seems that our methods of testing are the reason we've experienced different results. I can imagine that once you enable the setting to store all ratings to the tags, later disabling it would then remove all tags' ratings.
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My objection wasn't about it being simple or difficult to implement. That's not my call, and I don't think every change that's simple to implement should be implemented.
My objection was to making a yet another new setting somewhere in MusicBee to account for an alternate set of values in one tag because a single user, who doesn't want to use them for anything, might possibly want to look at them and sentimentally reminisce about them some time in the future.
MB already has a pretty healthy learning curve, which isn't a bad thing per se because most of what you have to learn has, if not universal value, at least very widespread value. This additional complication would pretty much have a target audience of one.
Two cents and all. Take it for what it's worth.
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I've never enabled that setting so it seems that our methods of testing are the reason we've experienced different results. I can imagine that once you enable the setting to store all ratings to the tags, later disabling it would then remove all tags' ratings.
The thing is, that shouldn't really matter. The tag is removed when I edit the track rating, not when I enable/disable the setting. Keeping the setting unchecked still gives the same result.
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…I thought it would be too much work to implement, for something so niche…
That is exactly what everybody else in this thread the wishlist thread is saying.
It is not about not understanding the request, and it is not about it being technically possible or not.
It is about making changes to MusicBee to accommodate for a very personal requirement, for a reason I personally don't find valid.
It would not be an improvement, it doesn't solve any actual problem, and it is very likely to cause issues and confusion for other users at a later moment in time.
Also it would be inconsistent with how MusicBee currently manages tags.
edit:
I replied with this since I thought this was still going on in the wishlist topic. My mistake.
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My objection wasn't about it being simple or difficult to implement. That's not my call, and I don't think every change that's simple to implement should be implemented.
My objection was to making a yet another new setting somewhere in MusicBee to account for an alternate set of values in one tag because a single user, who doesn't want to use them for anything, might possibly want to look at them and sentimentally reminisce about them some time in the future.
MB already has a pretty healthy learning curve, which isn't a bad thing per se because most of what you have to learn has, if not universal value, at least very widespread value. This additional complication would pretty much have a target audience of one.
Two cents and all. Take it for what it's worth.
I understand what you mean about overcomplicating things with an overabundance of settings.
That's the thing though, there wouldn't need to be a new setting because the current setting should already be behaving in the manner that I am requesting. Again, since I don't allow musicbee to SAVE ratings to tags, I would naturally also expect musicbee to not GET ratings from tags. The setting being disabled should thus already ignore rating tags, yet it doesn't. It doesn't make a ton of sense to satisfy one of these and not the other.
I've never enabled that setting so it seems that our methods of testing are the reason we've experienced different results. I can imagine that once you enable the setting to store all ratings to the tags, later disabling it would then remove all tags' ratings.
The thing is, that shouldn't really matter. The tag is removed when I edit the track rating, not when I enable/disable the setting. Keeping the setting unchecked still gives the same result.
I really don't know what to say then. I've just re-rated a bunch of my files that have the RATING tag and a bunch of other files that have the RATING WMP tag to un-rated, and all of them still have their original RATING and RATING WMP tags with their original values.
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I really don't know what to say then. I've just re-rated a bunch of my files that have the RATING tag and a bunch of other files that have the RATING WMP tag to un-rated, and all of them still have their original RATING and RATING WMP tags with their original values.
Okay, I see what is going on. This might be a bug afterall since the behaviour is not consistent.
If you rate the track from within the main panel then the embeded rating is preserved.
If you rate the track using the tag editor (shift+enter) and save, then the embeded rating is removed.
Can you confirm?
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I really don't know what to say then. I've just re-rated a bunch of my files that have the RATING tag and a bunch of other files that have the RATING WMP tag to un-rated, and all of them still have their original RATING and RATING WMP tags with their original values.
Okay, I see what is going on. This might be a bug afterall since the behaviour is not consistent.
If you rate the track from within the main panel then the embeded rating is preserved.
If you rate the track using the tag editor (shift+enter) and save, then the embeded rating is removed.
Can you confirm?
I was just thinking this myself. Yes, I've rated the tracks in the main panel only, by right-clicking them and going to Rating Track > Not Rated. I imagine the tag editor method you're using is the reason the tags are being edited because.. well.. you're editing the tag. Which I'm assuming is a separate value from MusicBee's internal ratings database.
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Yes, but the issue is that in the tag editor it also changes the library rating (same as the main panel). It doesn't edit the embedded tag, it merely removes it. The inconsistency between the two methods is what makes me think this should be considered a bug.
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Yes, but the issue is that in the tag editor it also changes the library rating (same as the main panel). It doesn't edit the embedded tag, it merely removes it. The inconsistency between the two methods is what makes me think this should be considered a bug.
Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, that does sound a bit off to me as well. I'd expect editing the rating from the tag editor would actually edit the tag's value, not remove the tag completely.
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I would expect it to adhere to whatever the setting "store ratings in music file" is set to, not always edit the embeded tag. I expect if someone sets the option to off for MB to not mess with the embedded rating and at the same time make it very clear if/when it will.
It's getting late over here so I'll create a bug report tomorrow and see how Steven feels about this.
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I would expect it to adhere to whatever the setting "store ratings in music file" is set to, not always edit the embeded tag. I expect if someone sets the option to off for MB to not mess with the embedded rating and at the same time make it very clear if/when it will.
It's getting late over here so I'll create a bug report tomorrow and see how Steven feels about this.
Agreed, and sounds good. If I end up posting one in the mean time, I'll let you know.
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Nah, please don't, I have that under control ;)
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Nah, please don't, I have that under control ;)
Kk, sounds good, thanks!
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Something I'm seeing upon testing though, is that MB removes any existing embeded track rating tag when you change the rating while the option "store ratings in music file" is disabled. So it's either one or the other, which would make sense for clarity and implementation simplicity (but at the same time pose problems in certain situations).
If it wouldn't do that, how long do you think it would take before users started posting bug reports because 'MusicBee displays a wrong rating, because the Tag Inspector shows a different rating'?
Seems like the scenario above is applicable right now afterall, just no one noticed until now :)
(https://i.imgur.com/DU0igfl.png)
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Seems like the scenario above is applicable right now afterall, just no one noticed until now :)
Interesting, good find ma_t14.
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Seems like the scenario above is applicable right now afterall, just no one noticed until now :)
It's something I pointed out here:
If you have 'store ratings in the music file' unchecked, then your original Winamp ratings are not going to be overwritten. Mb will save any changed rating to the database and display it, but the original rating stored in the file can still be viewed in the Tag Inspector.