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 ?