Proposal for a more realistic album rating system

[lnminente]

I'm thinking in this for some time...

When we use the arithmetic mean for calculating the album rating we are considering all the tracks have the same duration. And i consider an album with 40 minutes of 4 stars songs better than a album with a single of 4 minutes with 4 stars.

The way of showing stars for album ratings is very imprecise, it needs more accuracy, so when seeing albums, instead of stars i would preffer seeing points for better sorting, and those points would be the adding of the multiply of time by stars, like the following formula:
Album rating= (Time with 5 star)*5+(Time with 4.5 star)*4.5+(Time with 4 star)*4+(Time with 3.5 star)*3.5+...
The time could be 1 minute, fractions of 30 seconds, or any fraction which would give us the sufficient precise results

There are albums with many songs of very few seconds, for example Marilyn Manson has 99 tracks, many of them of 2 seconds. Would be good to have an option to choose how many stars should be considered the non rated tracks. Each of us has a different rating criteria, for me two stars is a normal song, for others is three, and others don't rate the intro/outro songs.

Tell me your thoughts community

[greenday1987]

It's highly complex. I wonder if it could work in practice. Although I use the rating system for only one thing. I rate a song on my iPod so that I can remember to 'love it' later and get it added to my autoplaylist of Last.fm loved tracks.

[lnminente]

That's how i started, rating only 5 starts, but later it becomes more addictive rating more and more songs for creating better playlists

[tcman50]

To each his own, I don't even have the time or patience to rate individual tracks, I just do albums. I have always been an album guy, goes back to my days growing up in the 70's and early 80's, back then it was an album centric music world, I guess I am still stuck in that world.

I do see the point about a formula based on both track rating and it's time. All though to me a 5 star 35 minute albums is just as good as a 5 star 50 minute album, but then again , thats just my opinion. 

[lnminente]

So i would add another main option, chosing between manual or tracks based rating for albums. My brain lies me, i tend to rate an album thinking in only one or two songs :/
Thanks for you opinion tcman50

[paq]

I would rather see this idea, and other ways to calculate ratings, implemented as a plugin instead of cluttering down how things look like now in MusicBee.

You can sort of achieve what you wish for if you export Album Duration to a custom tag for each track, see here: http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=5448.0 Then you can create a sorting set which sorts first Album Rating (desc) then by Album Duration (desc). Maybe you can throw in Play Count as well.

I rate those "2 seconds"-songs "No Stars" and "exclude zero rated tracks" when it comes to album ratings. This way I can separate what is left to be rated from already rated and those songs that aren't really songs doesn't weigh in into the album rating, which should be fine since the Album Rating should be based on its songs and not other type of tracks.

But yeah, we all have our own ways to rate stuff so the ideal solution would maybe be a plugin where one could customize the automatic calculation of album ratings.

[tcman50]

I would rather see this idea, and other ways to calculate ratings, implemented as a plugin instead of cluttering down how things look like now in MusicBee.

You can sort of achieve what you wish for if you export Album Duration to a custom tag for each track, see here: http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=5448.0 Then you can create a sorting set which sorts first Album Rating (desc) then by Album Duration (desc). Maybe you can throw in Play Count as well.

I rate those "2 seconds"-songs "No Stars" and "exclude zero rated tracks" when it comes to album ratings. This way I can separate what is left to be rated from already rated and those songs that aren't really songs doesn't weigh in into the album rating, which should be fine since the Album Rating should be based on its songs and not other type of tracks.

But yeah, we all have our own ways to rate stuff so the ideal solution would maybe be a plugin where one could customize the automatic calculation of album ratings.

I see don't see duration on the left list under the tag tool plugin for field export, oh well.

[lnminente]

If a plugin would do this automatically it would be perfectly fine for me, but i would like to avoid modifying all my mp3 files, i backup my music monthly with the modified files and would be not funny updating full albums only for changing the rating of one track. If possible, it would be better to be stored in the local database of MB.

[boroda]

I see don't see duration on the left list under the tag tool plugin for field export, oh well.

Duration pseudo-tag is called 'Time' (at the bottom of tag list) in native English localization of MB.

[boroda]

If a plugin would do this automatically it would be perfectly fine for me, but i would like to avoid modifying all my mp3 files, i backup my music monthly with the modified files and would be not funny updating full albums only for changing the rating of one track. If possible, it would be better to be stored in the local database of MB.

There is an option in MB if ratings should be stored in files or only in MB cache (Prefs/Tags(1)).

[lnminente]

But in that case i should avoid rating any song with MB if i want to see the same number of stars for each track in another player :/

A workaround could be a txt file in each album folder which would store that value and maybe others wich MB could use, and that value should be recalculated when the rating of a track changes.

Edit: Anyway i would prefer an option to choose between the classical formula or this one, and store the value in the same place than now.

[greenday1987]

I can sort of see where this is going but it's not for me. That to me it's just mess/clutter

[lnminente]

It's not for people who doesn't rate the tracks of an album, that's for sure. But still if someone only rates the 5 stars/love tracks, deciding how many stars give to the unrated tracks and having in mind their times would be an improvement for them too.

[boroda]

A workaround could be a txt file in each album folder which would store that value and maybe others wich MB could use, and that value should be recalculated when the rating of a track changes.

Even if Steven implements this, how you would get developers of other players to support this format?

[Steven]

i dont plan to include advanced album rating schemes directly into musicbee and agree with the comments above that it should be done in a plugin with advanced customisation options.
I havent closely read the proposal for saving to a text file but its not something i would build into MB.
Using custom fields in MB, you can either have it saved to the MusicBee database or directly into the music file. When saving it to the MB database, you can still get the value if you want to use it with another app eg. exporting the library database as an iTunes XML file, using boroda74's plugin etc