personal/universal ratings (formerly using the email address in ratings)

[Bee-liever]

This idea has grown out of removing MediaMonkey ratings and replacing them with POPM for some of my files (I even found some old Winamp and WMP ratings!). I was looking for a script to convert a rating in the 1-100 range that VorbisComments uses to a POPM rating, and searching the forum I found this and this and then the on-going saga over at Media Monkey.

So, is it possible to have MB write and separate the different ratings for different users by using the email address in the POPM frame?
eg. Bee-liever@MusicBee|128|0 and AnotherUser@MusicBee|196|0 as well as writing the "MusicBee|255|0" it currently does.

It does say in ID3:

There may be more than one "POPM" frame in each tag, but only one with the same email address.

You could then have the option: use ratings from [Bee-liever@MusicBee] if available to keep your ratings separate from other users that have access to your files.

[PlusMinus]

I second this wish so hard! I just recently switched to MusicBee and wanted to suggest the same thing. It would make sharing the same library so much easier.

[Bee-liever]

With a few recent posts about sharing ratings, I thought I'd raise (or is that dredge up?) this idea again.  

[lemongrass]

+1

[BeeBeeKing]

Why can't ratings be standard! I use another database cataloguing program called Music Collector from Collectorz.com and they use a 10 star rating system that doesn't seem to pick up ratings from anything else.

[Bee-liever]

I had a re-think of this;
Rather than MB having to keep track of everyone's ratings (see OP) you could have the option for personal/universal ratings.
Instead of MB wiping all other ratings when it writes the POPM frame, it could leave any that are already there, just adding in
For Universal  -  same as current: MusicBee|196|0
For Personal   -  would write: User@MusicBee|196|0  where User is the currently logged in user

Depending on the setting MB would look for and display 'Current User@MusicBee' or just 'MusicBee' info, ignoring any other POPM frames.
By not deleting the other POPM frames, other ratings values could still be viewed in Tag Inspector.

This could be used in FLAC files by writing both the 'User@MusicBee|70' tag as well as the standard '70' tag when 'Personal' is turned on.

[PlusMinus]

The biggest upside to this would be IMHO that one could create playlists like "my best rated and my girlfriends best rated".

[Antonski]

+1

I wondered many times how this could be realized, but reading this topic I think that suggested solution is very smart.
I just have one suggestion. Instead of system user, I would prefer to have MB users, that can be created/switched inside the MB.
This is because I plan to put my music on a NAS, but I don't have the same users on every one of my PCs.
For example, on my official laptop I have only domain accounts, on the home PC (that everybody use ) I have only one account and I have some other laptops with different accounts. However, I would like to see my ratings (and to use them for smart playlists) independently on the machine on which I'm currently working.
So, if it is too difficult to implement a multiuser approach in MB, maybe as a workaround the name of the library can be used as account in POPM (or in other internal tag, as Steven decides)? Then I could have my music in my library with my ratings, and my wife can have part of this tracks in her library with her ratings, maybe my daughter can include some of daddy's favorites in her library some day

[Bee-liever]

you could certainly make the profile selectable in Preferences, rather than using the logged in User:



I just don't know how much work is involved, or even the feasibility, of either option.
Despite the fact that the multiple user option is available in the POPM frame, I can't think of any player that has ever implemented it, so I assume it's quite difficult (programmatically speaking).

[Zak]

I just don't know how much work is involved, or even the feasibility, of either option.
Despite the fact that the multiple user option is available in the POPM frame, I can't think of any player that has ever implemented it, so I assume it's quite difficult (programmatically speaking).

My $0.02:

1. Storing different ratings based on the current profile like Bee-liever suggested seems easy enough.

Remember though that the ratings aren't just stored in the tag - a corresponding copy also needs to be stored in the MusicBee database. That gets trickier because a single database might store multiple ratings for each track and would need to know which to use at any given time.

2. Implementing user profiles like in the screenshot implies each user also gets their own set of preferences and filters and playlists etc. and that would be a nightmare to implement, debug and maintain. 

[psychoadept]

2. Implementing user profiles like in the screenshot implies each user also gets their own set of preferences and filters and playlists etc. and that would be a nightmare to implement, debug and maintain.  

I'm not particularly invested in this change since I don't even use ratings, but it seems like rather than creating some new profile system, each library could have its own set of ratings.  Might make multiple libraries more meaningful.

[Antonski]

2. Implementing user profiles like in the screenshot implies each user also gets their own set of preferences and filters and playlists etc. and that would be a nightmare to implement, debug and maintain. 

I'm not particularly invested in this change since I don't even use ratings, but it seems like rather than creating some new profile system, each library could have it's own set of ratings.  Might make multiple libraries more meaningful.

Completely agree.

[Steven]

i can do something along the lines that a user id is associated to a library and saving files using that user id in the rating tag. For scanning, preference would be given to that user id but if the only rating had no user id then that rating would be read.
Does that work for the people interested in this?

[Antonski]

I believe it will work fine for me.
Maybe it will be useful to have an option when writing personal ratings also to overwrite the universal rating, for compatibility with other programs/tools/plugins.

[Bee-liever]

sounds like it would work.  I'm interested