I've been a compuslive rater for a few yrs now. Here's what i found
- A rating based on a one listen, that too a full listen is not that accurate. I found ratings to be more consistant given at least 5 listens. I call this confidence, 1 listen is 70%, all the way upto 5 which is 100%. MC keeps track of # of listens. Some albums can take more, but i find 5 listens works for me.
This matters more if you listen to a lot of genres of music as each one fits a certain mood or time of day. If you spend a lot of time listening to just one genre, skipping to another can be some what jarring.
- It's easiest if you play albums from beginning to end, this way you get the mood that the artist wants to create, rather than skipping between tracks/artists/genres. I used smartlists in the beginning to get unrated tracks and found album scores to be slightly off.
- I created an avg score for the ratings of the album, or custom tag called album score, there is no way to automatically calculate this currently nor does a plugin that can do this exist either. But that score is very helpful when you want to get the best of a decade, artist, genre, series etc. How close the individual album scores turn out depends on how many times you listen to a track.
I only use ratings that i make, rather than what charts or sales indicate, it's your music and only you can tell whether you like it or not. I have to admit, i prefer albums as unit of music rather than individual tracks. Given a good score, i can put something on, do something else and be reasonably happy with the result.