Author Topic: How to disable MusicBee getting ratings from tags?  (Read 8320 times)

SonicRings

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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?

frankz

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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.

SonicRings

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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.

frankz

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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.
Last Edit: March 13, 2021, 04:29:44 AM by frankz

SonicRings

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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?

frankz

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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.

SonicRings

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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.
Last Edit: March 13, 2021, 06:13:52 AM by SonicRings

alec.tron

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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.

SonicRings

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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.

The Incredible Boom Boom

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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?

hiccup

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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.

SonicRings

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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.

hiccup

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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?

SonicRings

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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.

ma_t14

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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.
Last Edit: March 14, 2021, 02:32:08 PM by ma_t14