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[benn600]

A great addition, after some other ones I have presented (automatic copying of cover art and custom resizing to portable devices), would be to add a Rate mode.  This would allow users to quickly rate their music by an automated system.  Upon activation, it would randomly select a song based on criteria (defaults to -[rating]=1,2,3,4,5) and begin playing.  After 5 seconds, it would jump to a random point in the song and play for 5-15 seconds (time randomly selected), and continually jump around the song until the user pushes 1,2,3,4,5 on the keyboard.  After pushing a number, another non rated song would be selected and the process would continue.  At the moment, I have to do this exact process on my own because I am trying to rate my entire 7K song library (already almost to 1K!)

Thanks!

[Rob L]

you'd be able to do this by writing a plugin easily enough.

The ratings function is exposed externally.

Should be a pretty simple job - just need the code to obtain the list of all unrated tracks (easiest to just set up a view scheme) and play them then an interface to intercept the key presses. Not a bad way of doing it actually - my ratings definitely need a lot of work!

I don't think I'd want it to jump around though - if I was doing it, I'd probably just get it to play from the start and then either automatically skip when I rated or have another key press for skipping... you're right that the interface for rating doesn't make it easy for en masse rating...

[benn600]

The only requirement is that pushing 1-5 rates the song because technically, everything else that needs to be done can be done from the keyboard.  The biggest problem I would have is that at least smartlists do not update to remove rated items unless I click refresh, or I would imagine push F5.  The other key presses are somewhat complicated, but I could use one of my many macro programs I have to remap keys to make it very simple.  This is important because, as you guys might know, I keep talking about me and my sister ripping all of our music.  She helped with the scanning of cover art and I did the ripping.

Now, we are somewhat "racing" to finish rating our entire library before an upcoming event.  Not that it matters who wins--and I have quite a bit more than her to date.

[Rob L]

you wouldn't really need to refresh the smartlist, though, because it would just go through the list in turn...

[hit_ny]

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.

[Rob L]

should be fairly easy to write a plugin that populated your custom field with the average of the track ratings...

out of curiosity, how good a spread of ratings do you end up with? say, what percentage of albums end up at 5 and what at 1?

[benn600]

I'm sure you guys know that MC has an automatic statics view.  After pulling this up (Action window : File properties : statistics : rating breakdown), I end up with:

? 5819
1 37 (meant for long, special songs)
2 469
3 120
4 217
5 307

I have 3's, 4's, and 5's setup to copy to my player.  I can hold around 1200 songs on it (6 GB sansa e270) and I hope I don't run out of space--but I might, so I'll have to start limiting a bit).

Can't you create a calculated field and make an album rating?  I may try this on my own and others can try, too, so if someone gets it, they can post.

I think that "Number Plays" should be default in the views for sure!  This is so important but it isn't even on by default.

[hit_ny]

should be fairly easy to write a plugin that populated your custom field with the average of the track ratings...

I'm sure it is but i would really prefer MC support this instead. But it could potentially slow display speeds,

does you calculate each time in real time or

does it do it once maybe in calculation mode and save the results for display later ?

How to work calculation mode into the GUI ?

out of curiosity, how good a spread of ratings do you end up with? say, what percentage of albums end up at 5 and what at 1?

i doubled the avg, so it would be out of 10 instead and have a cutoff point called picks typically album scores of 8.5 - 10, which makes up about 30% of the total. The lowest that i keep are 6.