Proposal for a more realistic album rating system

[lnminente]

@boroda74: Well, as all the tracks would be unmodified, and the txt would be a "something better than nothing" and done by a MB plugin, if other software consider this criteria is an improvement they would simply implement it instead of the arithmetic mean.

@Steven: If it can save the album rating to the database but still letting write the track rating tag to the file there is no need of an txt which would slow down the system.

I tried a month ago exporting the values needed to calculate this using a spreadsheet, but i was not able to do it. I will keep on trying. Thanks to all

[boroda]

@boroda74: Well, as all the tracks would be unmodified, and the txt would be a "something better than nothing" and done by a MB plugin, if other software consider this criteria is an improvement they would simply implement it instead of the arithmetic mean.

Well, you can try to make the developers of WMP to add support to new custom format from Steven (though I think that MB is much greater than WMP). Waiting for they response to you.

[lnminente]

Very constructive... I'm currently doing calculations in a spreadsheet, i realized it could be no good to sacrifise a shorter album versus a longer one, a 3 minutes album of 5 stars is not worse than a 90 min 1 star album. So the formula now uses the percentage of the full length of the album instead of the time.

[boroda]

Very constructive...

No, I just meant that any new file format to store ratings is useless without broad support by software developers and MB already allows to store ratings in files or only in MB cache.

Some comprehensive calculation of ratings is quite another question, I could improve 'calculate average album rating' command in my plugin to take into account track duration, but this cant be calculated in realtime anyway (it least if you want to keep ratings in 0-5 stars range).

[BeeBeeKing]

maybe I missed something, but I fail to see what length has to do with Quality of the music. Let's face it, it's all subjective anyway.
 a 5 star 1 minute track is worth the ame as a 10 minute 5 star track imho.
Think in terms of a chocolate bar, a good quality one is the same if it's 25mm long or 100mm long.......or have I missed something?

[lnminente]

Let's forget the txt by now, what I wanted was to replace the actual algorithm. To see the reasons I will explain it better and from the beginning:

-I have a lot of albums with all their tracks rated except some intros/outros. And I see very few people rates the tracks they don't love.

-The aritmethic mean of the album tracks, is seen as album rating and i don't know if it is stored in the database or instantly calculated. It makes all of them to look very similar showing the same number of stars. I wanted to improve the precision. And i realized every track last different, so it could be considered. Until this point it would be percentage of the length of the album * rating.

-By other side, still trying to look for differences between albums, i thought a longer album of five stars would be better than a short one. Why? Because it makes me enjoy more. So the precision would be improved and instead of showing stars would be better showing points.  Again, all the tracks files should be unmodified, showing stars, but when showing albums seeing points. It's not a new format, is a improved internal calculation. So the algoritm would be now track length * rating.  Ok, and here i I realise this last point is the subjetive one, and i see it now after the comments read here, some people could prefer listening two albums with five stars than one with four for the same listening time

Now we forget the theory and come back to reality, i have a lot of albums rated and rarely i will see albums with more than 3 stars. So how to solve this?

Now the workaround: Seeing very few people rate the tracks of their albums, i understand to implementing this would be needed a plugin. We don't want to rewrite all the tracks, so better writing it in the MB database. Maybe i am wrong, but i understood if we store that album rating in the DB then we couldn't edit/update the tags in our files, only in the databases. And to solve that in two seconds thought i proposed the local file as the last attempt to see this done. So i don't have any interest in creating a standard for a txt, what i wanted was seeing more differences between my albums with rated tracks