Possible improvement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

[RossRoy]

Ok, here's food for thought. I've been struck by that idea earlier today.

I don't know about you, but I personally think it's quite tedious, daunting, and sometimes downright impossible to manually rate every song in our respective MMC.. I've tried it, on 5 albums, and I kept changing ratings on songs because I would think "oh, that song deserves a 4, but wait, I like that song more, but it's no more than a 4, so that other 4 should become 3.5" so on and so forth.

So, I've been thinking, maybe an automatic preference rating script could be added to the random player. Say the randomizer starts a song, I don't want to hear it so I skip it, it automatically loses half a star.

Say now I go right into MMC while the random mode is active and queue up a couple songs manually because I want to hear them, it automatically raises their rating by half a star.

If a song just played and I get right back and play it again right away, it gets a full star higher.

See what I'm going with that? Over time, you'd end up with a nice approximation of your preferences, which could then be taken into account by the randomizer (if it is not already) so that your favorite songs play more often.

Anybody has other thoughts on that?

[Spoons]

Re: Possible imprivement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

yep, i like the idea. of course there would have to be a menu specially made for this feature where you can adjust the sensitivity of your star preference settings. and whilst in this menu you could select either "%" or "stars" for rating type. but then that would lead to another menu where you can configure and add rating types

[Spoons]

Re: Possible imprivement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

i just noticed "imprivement" in the subject line :D is it french ?

[Spoon]

Re: Possible imprivement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

But what would grow a star rating? if everything had 3 stars and you skipped some tracks they might have 2 stars? nothing would have 4 or 5 stars?

[Spoons]

Re: Possible imprivement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

Say now I go right into MMC while the random mode is active and queue up a couple songs manually because I want to hear them, it automatically raises their rating by half a star.

i think Rossroy is saying all manual entries would automatically get half a star increment.

but after that? well i guess one could have an option to set it so when a track reaches 20 plays it gets another half star or something to that effect.

[RossRoy]

Re: Possible imprivement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

Well, the first post was only the idea at it's embryonic stage, I posted it hoping some people could bring this simplistic idea a level further

I believe manual addition to the playlist should raise the star rating, and possibly adding a file that's been played before and is still in the last 20 previously played list would raise it even more.

I'll admit it's much easier to think of situations where the star rating would go down instead of up, but I'm certain, as a group, we could come up with something

i just noticed "imprivement" in the subject line is it french ?

Hey! Give me some slack will ya? It was what, 1:00am when I posted that? :yawn: :p

It's fixed now :D

[OldCoder]

Re: Possible improvement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

It would also be nice to choose if you want to see the stars as "3.0" rather than the normal display, so it would take up less space on the display. If the column was made so narrow to disallow display of all 5 stars, convert it to the decimal format". Or add it as an option (checkbox?) to the Preferences window.

Window "real estate" is certainly a problem with the amount of data that we accumulate on our tracks. Tough to solve while keeping everyone happy....

[Elmorôth]

Re: Possible improvement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

it's definitely a good idea...

- maybe you could have a favorite genre or artist, whom you can give an extra boost, let's say, it gets an extra half a star or whatever you please.
you could put this with the menu for the star rating system.

of course you should be able to keep the normal rating system sinds some people won't like dynamic rating "because it *blooper**blooper**blooper**blooper*s up their library"

[Paddy]

Re: Possible improvement to the "Star Rating" system in MMC

Yeah I agree, excellent idea :D

Some people may not like it, so an option to turn it off and use manual ratings instead would be a good idea. I've got loads of mp3's which I have to be in the right mood to listen to, so if they pop up on random I'll immediately skip them. So if they automatically lose half a star because of this, then they won't bug me as much

Conversely any track I choose to play or I enqueue gets an extra half star added + as Razgo said if a track is played (by random or by selection) a few times, say 5 it gets an extra half star. So your fave songs automatically get played more and the ones you dislike get played less. Of course with a large collection it'll take a while to work through, but at least the songs will get some kind of ranking!!