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[psionet]

Hi there

I have tried to find the information in the help section of MJ without luck.

How does MJ rate a file under the "Rating Section", I know I can manual rate it but it seems to rate a file without my intervention?  How does MJ rate the intensity of a file?

Kind Regards

Dave

[lOth]

I don't think MC rates files without your intervention. More likely, you must have happened to click in the rating column while just trying to select files. This is how one sets the rating manually. If you don't want to set the rating manually, I would recommend that you move the rating column on the right so that you don't use it inadvertently or that you get rid of it altogether (right click on the title of the column --> visible columns --> uncheck 'rating')

[NoCodeUK]

The intensity rating is calculated during audio analysis.  It has nothing to do with the actual Rating of a file.  It is more a sort of abstract figure to show how 'intense' the music is.  It is not an exact science and you may find the figure to be unreliable.  Personally I just ignore it...

Adam

[lOth]

It is not an exact science and you may find the figure to be unreliable

Indeed, intensity 2 for 'Da Funk' by Daft Punk seems to me as wrong as intensity 4 for 'Dear Prudence' by The Beatles...  :-/

[NoCodeUK]

Proves how unreliuable it is then cos for me Dear Prudence had 3

Adam

[Matt]

Intensity depends a lot on how the track was mastered.  It's looking mainly at variations in volume.  The idea is that intense music never lets up whereas less intense music has passages of loud intermingled with passages that are less loud.

[NoCodeUK]

Thanks Matt.  I wasn't knocking the system just letting the original poster know that it wasn't something to hedge all your money on  The fact that 10th and I have different values for the same song could this be related to the encoding??

Cheers anyway for the explanation I always wondered what it measured

Adam

[drosoph]

The only other thing is that King's plugin (Chart Finder) will put ratings on files based on their position in the Billboard Hits list, or others ... when run) ...

Just another possibility!

[lOth]

[It's looking mainly at variations in volume/quote]

should we call it 'amplitude' then??

[hit_ny]

Intensity depends a lot on how the track was mastered.  It's looking mainly at variations in volume.  The idea is that intense music never lets up whereas less intense music has passages of loud intermingled with passages that are less loud.

Mastering seems to be the key. Here's an interesting article http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C

Note how the waveforms get more bunched up between tracks of the same artist over the years. i would imagine this happens in a lot of music and could likely throw of the intensity measurements in MC. IN the sense that the dynamic range that MC uses to calculate intenisty is being reduced.


it seems that the more recent music might not give accurate intensity values since there is a trend to make everything sound as loud as possible. So i would expect the differences in volume to be smaller.

However older stuff maybe early 90' - mid 90s and before should work. An intersting note to his is that the loudness trend started off in the US quite a few yrs before europe, it seems europe caught on to this only in the late nineties and then could not avoid it despite the opinion of many mastering engineers that this was a bad idea in general.( wont get into that as its hotly debated)

The idea to calculate intenisty is interesting depending on the transisitons in volume, but i think another method to determine intensity might need to be found.

For instance, given the loudness trend.

- any music that is sufficiently loud will get tagged with a lower intensity as it has small diff in loudness but, to a listener would certainly be considered more intense.

- any relatively chilled out music will still have small transitions and will similarly be tagged intense whereas it really isnt.

i personally use genre as well in smartlists to help with this. But the promise of MC to me is to be able to detect these sorts of things automatically rather than manually.

BPMs detection is a good start and hope there will be more ideas thrown into MC to help with this.

comments anyone ?

[LisaRCT]

Mastering seems to be the key. Here's an interesting article http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E 005DAF1C
comments anyone ?

WOW
Simply amazing, great article, makes perfec sense.

[gkerber]

I knew it was bad, about the loudness, but that article really clears it up.

I've always ranted about the loss of dynamic range in newer cds.

[Matt]

Cool post and link.

There are a lot of artists where I love their old stuff, but can hardly listen to their newer CDs because there's just no dynamic range.  Grrrr....

[Bartabedian]

Also on-topic...

http://zwan.com/BillyPost.html


But the recent trend in mastering isn't all just about loudness, and the "dog****" quality stems from many other variables as well; Cost, location, tools used, market flexibility (I kid you not, I had an A&R guy use that exact term to me discussing a master once), the list goes on. And in the link's case, an artist who started from the very beginning with that sound in mind.

Plus, some of the loudest CD's I have are some of the best mastered ones, the Beastie Boys "Check Your Head" comes to mind, it just leaps off the disc and sounds great to boot. There's more to the problem than just making it loud. But I agree, there is a problem in today's mastering.