Author Topic: Disable MusicBee getting ratings from files' tags  (Read 7078 times)

SonicRings

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I'd like to ignore all rating tags that are stored in my music files. I do not wish to delete these tags, I simply wish to have them ignored.

In Tags(1), there is a setting you can disable so it DOESN'T save newly rated songs to the tags, so I think it would be a good addition (and I imagine fairly easy to implement) to expect the opposite effect where it DOESN'T take into account said tags.
Last Edit: March 13, 2021, 06:14:42 AM by SonicRings

hiccup

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-1

I think creating some parallel shadow world for rating tags would be a complication with far more negatives then positives.
It would be an accident waiting to happen for a lot of users that don't have good insights on how tags work and how they are stored.


phred

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Perhaps I'm not understanding this completely. Can't the ratings simply be set not to be displayed? If so, there's the solution and there's no need for Steven to spend any time on this.
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

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frankz

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Perhaps I'm not understanding this completely. Can't the ratings simply be set not to be displayed? If so, there's the solution and there's no need for Steven to spend any time on this.
I already went down that road.

hiccup

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It also took me a while to understand the reasoning behind this, but I now understand that the OP wants to write and read rating tags exclusively from MB's database.
So a song could have a rating tag in the file itself which would be ignored, and another one in the database that will be read.
And all this can be avoided by checking and cleaning up files that you import into your library.
Just the same as you would do with genre, comment, and many other tags.

phred

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I already went down that road.
That would explain why it sounded familiar.
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

----------
The FAQ
The Wiki
Posting screenshots is here
Searching the forum with Google is  here

SonicRings

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I'm noticing a lot of familiar faces -1'ing me here. I guess it's the same people who view every request and thus vote more than normal users. I'm curious if other users feel this way about this request because currently it just seems like the few users contributing all share the same opinion and would see no benefit to this request, and are adding a bunch of downvotes that would be quite difficult for other regular users to counterbalance with their upvotes simply because other regular users don't check every wishlist in the wishlist section.

-1

I think creating some parallel shadow world for rating tags would be a complication with far more negatives then positives.
It would be an accident waiting to happen for a lot of users that don't have good insights on how tags work and how they are stored.
Can you elaborate on your "parallel shadow world for rating tags" analogy? I'm only requesting the tags not be looked at in MusicBee (in other words, ignored). I'm not requesting any parallelism. I don't save musicbee's internal database ratings to tags, so naturally I wouldn't want tags to contribute to musicbee's internal database ratings. I think you realized this though since you followed up with:

It also took me a while to understand the reasoning behind this, but I now understand that the OP wants to write and read rating tags exclusively from MB's database.
So a song could have a rating tag in the file itself which would be ignored, and another one in the database that will be read.
What you said here is correct: this is exactly what I want. There's already similar functionality for custom tags which can be saved to the internal database only: I wish for ratings to be treated similarly.



That way my files can keep their ratings for use with other players without interfering with my MusicBee database. Whether that's by giving us the option to blacklist a tag from being considered in MusicBee, or making a specific setting for rating tags in files.

In other words, I want the local database to take precedence when the "store ratings in the music file" setting is unchecked. Perhaps ignoring tags that musicbee doesn't save to anyway.
Last Edit: March 13, 2021, 09:41:42 PM by SonicRings

hiccup

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I'm noticing a lot of familiar faces -1'ing me here.
I -1'ed your suggestion, not you.

It's true, some forum members speak out and participate on a regular base, and many don't.
People that speak out make a difference, those that remain silent won't.

When I mentioned a 'parallel shadow world', I meant that if your wish is granted, there would be ratings both in files and in MusicBee's database.
You know what you are doing, so that wouldn't be an issue for you.
But less savvy and invested MusicBee users will not fully understand it, which—in my opinion—is likely to cause issues for them at some moment in time, and it will then be a burden on the forum members that not only voice their opinions or make requests, but also contribute by helping other members.

SonicRings

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I'm noticing a lot of familiar faces -1'ing me here.
I -1'ed your suggestion, not you.

It's true, some forum members speak out and participate on a regular base, and many don't.
People that speak out make a difference, those that remain silent won't.

When I mentioned a 'parallel shadow world', I meant that if your wish is granted, there would be ratings both in files and in MusicBee's database.
You know what you are doing, so that wouldn't be an issue for you.
But less savvy and invested MusicBee users will not fully understand it, which—in my opinion—is likely to cause issues for them at some moment in time, and it will then be a burden on the forum members that not only voice their opinions or make requests, but also contribute by helping other members.
Honestly, if it's tied to the "store ratings in the music file" setting, I don't think there will be any confusion: when the setting is unchecked, on top of ratings not being saved to tags, rating tags will not be considered. When checked, on top of ratings being saved to tags, rating tags will be considered.

hiccup

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Honestly, if it's tied to the "store ratings in the music file" setting, I don't think there will be any confusion: when the setting is unchecked, on top of ratings not being saved to tags, rating tags will not be considered. When checked, on top of ratings being saved to tags, rating tags will be considered.
I get that, and from a technical and theoretical objective I might even support it.
But, being honest here: if you would sanitize/clean up your files when importing new files to MusicBee this wouldn't need to be an additional option at all.
Am I right?

SonicRings

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Honestly, if it's tied to the "store ratings in the music file" setting, I don't think there will be any confusion: when the setting is unchecked, on top of ratings not being saved to tags, rating tags will not be considered. When checked, on top of ratings being saved to tags, rating tags will be considered.
I get that, and from a technical and theoretical objective I might even support it.
But, being honest here: if you would sanitize/clean up your files when importing new files to MusicBee this wouldn't need to be an additional option at all.
Am I right?
I don't have an issue with fixing the tags of my files for newly acquired files, and am very diligent in doing so. But I don't want to lose the ratings I've given my files way back when I still used winamp. It's not about tag upkeep: I just don't want to lose these tags and want to maintain compatibility of my files' ratings with winamp.

hiccup

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I just don't want to lose these tags and want to maintain compatibility of my files' ratings with winamp.
Do you mean that rating tags written by MusicBee are not recognized by Winamp?

SonicRings

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I just don't want to lose these tags and want to maintain compatibility of my files' ratings with winamp.
Do you mean that rating tags written by MusicBee are not recognized by Winamp?
I've never written ratings from MusicBee to tags. So no, since the files I rate in MusicBee don't have a rating tag, they're not recognized as having a rating by Winamp.

hiccup

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But I don't want to lose the ratings I've given my files way back when I still used winamp.
I hope you understand that this is about improving MusicBee where it benefits a certain majority of users.

I may be reading the above quote wrong, but I read it as if:
You have rated songs in the past with Winamp, and at this moment in time you now using MusicBee you may have some different opinions on how you want to rate some tracks. But for sentimental reasons you would also like to keep the old ratings available somehow.

I truly hope I am completely misunderstanding.
If not I will change my -1 to -googol