Random playback weighted by user ratings

[Unregistered]

I have been using your software to rip CD's for a while, and have liked it since the first time I used it. Recently I went to dload an update and came across dAP, and so far am impressed with the quality of the program. I was using winamp before, but it had problems with killing my soundcard under win2k (requiring a restart of the card and/or logout-login to get it working again). So far, I am happy to say I haven't experienced that with dAP.

I love the Music collection interface, it has so much more detail than anything else, and the ratings system is something I have wished for before. But what I would really like to see is a way of making the ratings affect how often you hear something.

From what I can tell now, the ratings are only for sorting, and possibly playing all songs over a certain rating. While that is nice, would it be possible to have the ratings weight the random playback?

So higher rated songs get played more often then lower rated songs. As I have songs that are alright, but I don't like to hear them as much as others. Hmm, maybe a way to make it intelligently modify the ratings...

Have the 5 star system for a rough idea of what the user likes, but hide a finer rating underneath.

For example, each half star would be worth 10 points, so when the song first gets put in at 2.5, that would be 50 points. (The user wouldn't deal with this detail, it would look the same as it does now to them). Every time the user skips a song while it is playing, the song's rating goes down by a point or so. When a user specifically selects/replays a song, the rating goes up a few points. This would all be hidden from the interface, and just the number tracked in the background. After a while, this could have the effect of shifting the Star rating of the song (displayed star being whatever is closest to the current rating. )

I know this might sound a bit overly complex, but the result would be how those ratings are used in the random playback. The rating would be a multiplier making each track more or less likely to get played. As people get tired of hearing songs, they are more likely to skip over them, and whether or not they consciously realize they are getting tired of the song, the program will "learn" from their actions. As their tastes change, they will seek to the songs they might not have heard in a while, and it will slowly get played more and more.

Just bored and thinking too much for my own good... Keep up the quality work!

- Azhrarn@darkgalaxy.com

[Unregistered]

Please include this

From the moment I started using dAP, I assumed the rating would affect random play this way. I was disappointed, after using the player for a while, when I realized it didn't work this way.

[kweller]

Just to put the other side of the coin, here's someone who would prefer 'random' to be precisely that...

Kevin

[Unregistered]

Yeah, I didn't say to make it required. But it would be a nice option. Instead of telling to *only* play songs that are over a certain rating, this would let the songs I don't like as much still get played. Just not as often.

- Az-Still-too-lazy-to-register

[Spoon]

>But what I would really like to see is a way of making the ratings affect how often you hear something.

It should already do this, put it this way...dAP has been playing my 2000 tracks for over a year now, and if I sort the list 'By Times Played' all the top ones are 5 stars, filtering down to half a star.

[Unregistered]

Hmm, I wsn't aware that you did build in ranking weighted playback (Undocumented feature? ) If so, then cool. This isn't just from you telling it to play only songs greater then X stars a few times however, is it? Either way, you get the idea.

-Az

[Spoon]

No, it does it it's self.

[kweller]

More's the pity