Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[hit_ny]

This feature has made an appearance in the library browser recently but is not very configurable tho JRiver might change this in v12. As far as i understand, it averages the track ratings to give an album rating.

The point of this post is to understand whether averaging track ratings gives a valid indication to how good an album was preceived to be.

I find album ratings are quite useful when having to quickly pick "good" albums, possibly of varied genres, from a large library.

I realise this is a very subjective topic, but the idea of ratings is to differentiate tracks by degrees of user preference.  So if the track ratings are reliable, it might extend right up to the album level too. Sure there will be exceptions but they tend to be in the minority in my experience.


Having used averaged ratings for some months now, i'm beginning to have doubts about it.

example
take 2 albums, A & B of similar genres.
A has 10 tracks, of which 2 tracks are rated at 4 stars and the rest at 3 stars.
B has 15 tracks with the same ratings as A.

The avg album scores for A & B are 3.2 & 3.1  (rounded)

Can we say that A is better than B given it has a higher score ?

Seems so ... but i think they are equal in rank.

Averaging gives albums with fewer tracks, a higher score than larger albums with just as many good tracks.

i tried to experiment with another method instead of averaging.

Give each album a base score of 3.0, i usually give all tracks a base score of 3 stars and increase/decrease as i listen.

4 star tracks, add 0.1 ,
5 star tracks,add 0.2
2 stars take away 0.1
1 star take away 0.2

from the album base score of 3.0

Using the above it possible to get album ratings based on how many good or bad tracks they have regardless of how many 3 star tracks they might have.

So in the example above both albums would have the same album rating of 3.2.

I'm thinking this produces a more realistic score as listening to an album is cummulative ie (nice / ok / not so nice) as opposed to averaging.

It also gives you ranks in discrete intervals of 0.1, so given a score were 3.4, one could "roughly" tell it has 2 (5 star tracks), 4 (4 star tracks) or a combination of both. An averaged album rating is less obvious.

if you got a 20 track CD and 11 of them were 5 stars, the album rating would be 5 stars period. Or any other combination that resulted in an album score > 5. The same would apply in the other direction towards 0.


What do people think ?

[broncodan]

There is an Album Rating field?  I haven't seen this in the RC of MC 11.  Am I missing something?

I have also given this some thought - but I was thinking that you could at least choose albums by the number of tracks that have a certain rating using a smartlist (I don't know alot abou these but I am sure there is someone out there who could do this) and then play these albums?

[Alex B]

Nice thinking. I look forward to seeing a calculated album rating field in the future. That kind of math would be needed for making it work properly.

I have already a custom field for my album ratings, but as I have explained before, those ratings are based on my personal feelings, memories and thoughts about the albums as a whole, not exactly on the track ratings.

Calculated album ratings would be useful besides my current ratings.

[Sauzee]

I use the preference field to give albums ratings. I use Fantastic, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor, as my rating values - works well for me.

I then use this in a view scheme with view set to album thumbnails - so I can see at a glance all my albums in each category.

This method doesn't require that you slavishly rate each individual track - I tend to only rate individual tracks if they are exceptionally good or bad.

[Alex B]

There is an Album Rating field?  I haven't seen this in the RC of MC 11.  Am I missing something?

You can see it only inside Library Browser. Place the mouse pointer over an album title and look at the changing texts.

[hit_ny]

I use the preference field to give albums ratings. I use Fantastic, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor, as my rating values - works well for me.

I then use this in a view scheme with view set to album thumbnails - so I can see at a glance all my albums in each category.

i was going to assign those preferences based on a scale derived from the album ratings. If ratings fall within defined intervals for example.

This method doesn't require that you slavishly rate each individual track - I tend to only rate individual tracks if they are exceptionally good or bad.

Nor would you need to if all tracks started at a base score of 3. It's what i do at the beginning of each album. And promote/demote etc as i go along.

The really slavish part is calculating the ratings and keeping them in sync as preferences change (maybe the Analyse Audio dialog could have an option to do this), which im hoping JRiver will implement, if this idea has any merit.

It might be quicker to execute an add/subtract than an average in terms of CPU time.

[broncodan]

You can see it only inside Library Browser. Place the mouse pointer over an album title and look at the changing texts.

I see - thanks!  Is there anyway to see a list of this information anywhere else in MC?  Some of this data would be useful for smartlists.