Virtual - "on the fly" - "Album Rating Tag".

[jbee]

MusicBee supports tagging music files with "album rating", meaning a certain song can be rated X while the album this song belongs to can be rated Y. This is obviously good.

We have the Additional tagging tools plugin, which adds the ability to "Calculate average album ratings for displayed tracks", which is exactly how I think the "Album Rating"-tag should be used; it should be set to the arithmetic average of all the tracks on the album in question. The plugin can even be configured to "Auto calculate average album ratings on track rating change".

Then, if you're using the "Album and Track" layout for the music library, it's quite easy to configure it to show the "Album Rating" next to every album.

This is exactly what I want, with only one small difference.

I don't want to have the "Album Rating"-tag written to for all my music. I wish to keep this tag left alone. Instead I'd like to see a virtual, dynamic, "on the fly" "Album Rating Tag", that could be displayed. A tag which is calculated "on the fly" from the songs of the album (obviously recalculated when rating for a song is changed).

I am aware of the option to uncheck "store ratings in the music file", but this comes with the price of not having the track ratings stored in the files, which I still want.

I guess that I see two alternatives, either:
 1) the preferred; an all dynamic tag with no database to store and retrieve information from, or
 2) the ability to configure (only) the album rating tag to be stored solely to the MusicBee database.

[Steven]

i do agree with this - the tagging tools plugin does allow a more "granular" approach where you can calculate album ratings and then override for individual albums. And of course it also saves the rating to file.

But for people wanting just a simple on-the-fly calculated average rating i have added a new display/ filtering field: "Album Rating (Auto)" i changed my mind and its now a setting in the Tags(1) preferences. Its either (a) auto-calculated but not stored or (b) is editable and stored (as now). This is so there is just one Album Rating field. You can still use the tagging tools plugin to do bulk album rating calculations/ storing to file.

It only counts rated tracks, so an album with 9 unrated tracks would be unrated, whereas an album with only 4 tracks rated would only have those 4 tracks count to the average.

Its in the next update

[boroda]

Steven, I think that *displaying* single/unified album rating is a good solution, but it would be better if 'auto album rating' and 'stored album rating' had different ids in API (for instance if it would be possible to copy auto album rating to stored one or to simultaneously calculate stored (in some probably complex way) and virtual album ratings, and to change displayed value in prefs on the fly).

P.S. Maybe its worth to add support for custom virtual tags in API? I was already thinking about implementing dynamic album rating in plugin, but there may be much more implementations.

[paq]

I use the "No stars" rating for songs that really aren't "songs", for example "Intro", "Outro", commentary tracks, interludes, sound effects and so on. Because of this I can work through a list of everything that needs to be rated in the library without giving these type of songs a rating. Therefore, would it be possible to add the option to not weigh in songs with "No stars" in the album average rating?

[voon]

I always wondered what this album rating should be for ... I listen to the tracks, I like, I don't keep tracks just for the sake of a complete album, I delete those ...

[Steven]

I use the "No stars" rating for songs that really aren't "songs", for example "Intro", "Outro", commentary tracks, interludes, sound effects and so on. Because of this I can work through a list of everything that needs to be rated in the library without giving these type of songs a rating. Therefore, would it be possible to add the option to not weigh in songs with "No stars" in the album average rating?

its in this version, set in the Tags(1) preferences

[paq]

I use the "No stars" rating for songs that really aren't "songs", for example "Intro", "Outro", commentary tracks, interludes, sound effects and so on. Because of this I can work through a list of everything that needs to be rated in the library without giving these type of songs a rating. Therefore, would it be possible to add the option to not weigh in songs with "No stars" in the album average rating?

its in this version, set in the Tags(1) preferences

Thank you Steven! However I found a bug in that version that I think could be related to this, see this bug report: http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=5323.0

[jbee]

First of all, Steven: thank you very much! This is absolutely brilliant and works perfectly!

I use the "No stars" rating for songs that really aren't "songs", for example "Intro", "Outro", commentary tracks, interludes, sound effects and so on. Because of this I can work through a list of everything that needs to be rated in the library without giving these type of songs a rating. Therefore, would it be possible to add the option to not weigh in songs with "No stars" in the album average rating?

Good request...

its in this version, set in the Tags(1) preferences

...and thanks for implementation!

By no means do I want to take away from this request by paq, I think MusicBee goes hand-in-hand with OPTIONS; the ability to configure it just the way you want it, which is the most important reason for which I personally use MusicBee.

So I have another request which is kind of, in a way, the opposite of the request posted by paq: I'd love to see the option to count "not yet rated tracks" as "0", towards the "Album rating". Maybe another check-box?

It could be argued that then I could just go through my library and rate all "unrated" with "0", but I want to keep the visual difference between "not rated" and "no stars".

Thanks again Steven for implementing my request!