yep. it's just so funny to think that you can rate an entire album 1-5 stars.
Sure you can, but why limit yourself to just 5 steps, not granular enough, if you go upto 10 with half points thats much better. Just round up or down to the nearest half point.
First, how are you able to condense 12 songs down? Do you pick the best song and rate the album that? An average score?
Best song is obvious from the ratings, average score is what i use. I found it takes a few listens to stabilise the rating. Geting the ratings part down took a while for me, i used half ratings since i found myself constrained with just 3 points, gives less variance to the album score.
Order of tracks usually doesn't matter to MC users because they rarely listen to songs in order, I would think...random works pretty good usually.
Depends on the music you listen to, maybe its true for the pop, country, rock crowd but it falls down with more loungey, electronic, mood music. You can certainly mix this sort of music up but it takes a bit of skill to get the feel right, random is no where close to doing this.
Each album is an experience on its own, i tried using random to rate stuff initially and found my ratings were skewed, some tracks sound better when heard in sequence in the album than on thier own.
Plus, when every CD is a 4 or 5--what then?
Maybe with just the classics, those would be in that range.
The only good ratings are ratings by other consumers on consumer products about whether it works or not...music can work for some people but not others. If everyone agreed on music taste, then all CDs that sold at all would be owned by everyone.
I got pretty close when ppl that shared similar tastes recommended stuff, at worst i rated 5/10 albums as picks, a lot better than if i had to pick stuff out of random where i would have to go through 5-10 to find even a single pick.
Last FM could help a bit here. Checking out the sites recommended in an earlier thread, mystrands.com appears to do a decent job of finding similar music given an artist.