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[tcman41]

The 5 star rating system is ok but i always thought that a 10 star rating system would be a little more accurate, it would just give us a little more to work with.

The strange part is i don't think i have ever seen anyone else bring this up, could this possiably be a future update and is anyone else interested?

TC 

[hit_ny]

I've wanted the half ratings for a long time but nothing has appeared so far.

So i made my own, create a custom field called Half ratings of Data type  decimal. I position this next to the default ratings field in playing now. If i come across a track i think that needs a half rating, i give it either 2 or 3 stars, then enter 2.5 or 3.5 in the half ratings column. This way i get to keep the ease of use of stars (1 click to rate afterall) and also a half rating if the track needs it. Half ratings are exceptions, i only enter those in, and leave blank for whole ratings.

It's a workaround, but i have this wierd feeling that we won't see half star ratings until the iPod can support it. When that actually happens is any one's guess, if ever. However if it does happen, all you need to do is copy form the half rating field to the new Ratings field and remove the custom field, so its future proof

[Mr ChriZ]

I'm always curious as to how anyone rates anything.
I find that what I think of a track changes with my mood,
and I may hate it one day and love it the next... and
if something really was so bad it deserved one star
I'd probably remove it from my collection...
So how you can get to the point where you need a 10 point
rating system beats me!
Guess you guys are just alot more decisive than I am! 

[gk666999]

1=Nevere want to hear it again / can't imagine myself wanting to put that song on again under any circumstance (equals to mark to delete)
2=Good just enough to not to be deleted/nothing special/average/may like it one day
3=I definately like it, memorable
4=I'm lovin' it
5=Can't get enough of it!

[hit_ny]

I'm always curious as to how anyone rates anything.
I find that what I think of a track changes with my mood,

You need to know what genres you are in the mood for.

I find earlier in the day, slower stuff usually works better. Later in the evening towards the night more upbeat. So i stick to certain groups of genres depending on the time of the day.

I think the more you hear an album the better you know whether you like it or not. You can get a bit thrown off, if you have been listening to certain genres for many days on the trot and then suddenly throw in a leftfield album. It's a bit jarring at first, but is it any good ? i just play it repeatedly till i get it.

Now, that we got through the initial listen, will the rating stand up with further listens. I came up with a confidence system based on the number of listens.
1st play - 60% confidence
...
5th play - 100%

So if a track has been listened more than 5 times, chances are i pretty much nailed it.Some wierd albums might take more listens but this seems to catch most. Depending on your library size, you'd be lucky if ever get to listen that many times, of course the odd favorites will defnitely be there. You might come across tracks that have more than 20 listens, maybe its time to tag them as tired

The more accurate the track ratings, the better the album ratings, i just avg the tracks and enter them into a custom tag. At times when i don't want to decide, just do a random pick of an album thats at least 8.5/10 or above and which has not been listened in over 6 months.

Some times i come across an album i rated long ago and wonder what i was thinking off ..it's either a lot better or worse.

[Mr ChriZ]

Quite a science! 

[LonWar]

I'm always curious as to how anyone rates anything.
I find that what I think of a track changes with my mood,
and I may hate it one day and love it the next... and
if something really was so bad it deserved one star
I'd probably remove it from my collection...
So how you can get to the point where you need a 10 point
rating system beats me!
Guess you guys are just alot more decisive than I am! 

I keep the AMG Rating.... Just for curiosity...... The 1/2 ratings would be cool.

[dNj]

I would be happy with 4 stars. 
1star=delete
2star=listen again to decide if I want to keep or delete
3star=Great track
4star=Gem

More than anything, I would like a separate star rating system for the genre field, so I can rate a track based on its genre.  For example, I might rate a particular Desi Downtempo [genre] track a 4 star.  However, for the genre of Desi Downtempo I would consider it a 5 star track.

I've wanted the half ratings for a long time but nothing has appeared so far.

So i made my own, create a custom field called Half ratings of Data type  decimal. I position this next to the default ratings field in playing now. If i come across a track i think that needs a half rating, i give it either 2 or 3 stars, then enter 2.5 or 3.5 in the half ratings column. This way i get to keep the ease of use of stars (1 click to rate afterall) and also a half rating if the track needs it. Half ratings are exceptions, i only enter those in, and leave blank for whole ratings.

Great idea..thanks.  It would be nice to have half star rating ability a standard option in MC12. 

[tcman41]

The overall request seeems to be for half stars, that would work as well, kind of the same thing, would give a person basically 10 different levels on how to rate a track or album (giving all tracks the same rating).

Of course better would be a rating based on the average of the ratings given to all the individual tracks on the album but i believe in order to obtain this the calculations would be time consuming.

I know various people have written smartlists and searches as a way to get a round some of this but i was looking for more of change in the program to accomplish this, at least to tie us over until perhaps something can be written into mc12.

TC

[GHammer]

If you need a rating system, it seems a 10 point system is good.
Personally out of all my music I only have 75-100 tagged 4 or 5.
I do have a few that are tagged 1.
Why keep the ones? Completeness...

[hit_ny]

I would be happy with 4 stars. 
1star=delete
2star=listen again to decide if I want to keep or delete
3star=Great track
4star=Gem

This was good enough when i started off rating. But if you have many albums in a genre, over time i found sometimes a track was better than a 3 but not good enough to be a 4. So i taggged it as 4. Or if a track was not good enough to be a 3, it got knocked down to 2.

When i did the album ratings, i found results a bit skewed, albums that were good overall were not getting  the expected higher scores and the opposite. At this point i brought in the half ratings and found the scores appearing more realistic. Albums with a lot of 3.5 stars started creeping up the album score table. Albums with many 2.5 stars did not drop as low as 2 stars.

The trick with a 10 star (or 5 star with half scores) is not to think on a scale of 1 to 10 but rather a scale of 1 to 5 and then adjust accordingly. It takes a bit of practice but works.

More than anything, I would like a separate star rating system for the genre field, so I can rate a track based on its genre.  For example, I might rate a particular Desi Downtempo [genre] track a 4 star.  However, for the genre of Desi Downtempo I would consider it a 5 star track.

This could become unwieldy, instead why not compare like with like. If you have album scores, then a viewscheme showing genres & album will show best of's towards the end of the album pane.

[pat1066]

Multiple choice opinions should always be of an even number!
"What? No middle of the road option? You mean I have got to be decisive?"

Heh, heh - make 'em squirm 

[urlwolf]

I can't believe you guys have the time to rate all your music

[hit_ny]

That's the idea. No time.

But you do take the time to listen right ?

Ratings allows a quick way to remember what you thought, for the future.

[Deivit]

I rate all the music 3 stars as it is imported into MC. This is for three reasons:

1.- If I bought/downloaded the CD it's probably because i "think" I will like it... being it because I've listened to samples or I like the artist, it's been recommended, I've read a review, etc.
2.- The (?) rated songs are the recently imported that need any tagging work on them. It's useful to have them easily accesible via a view scheme. Once the tagging work is finished, applying the 3-star rating is the last task I do.
3.- I like to see those fancy stars in my PN plug-in

When I listen to a song, If it's only OK I leave the 3-stars rating. If i like it a lot, I give it 4 stars and if I think it's a great song that I will want to listen over and over, I give it the 5-stars treatement. Contrary, if i don't like it too much I give it 2-stars and if i totally dislike it I give it 1-star but do not delete it, since it's part of an album. As others have said, this may change with the time and a 5-star song can be "downgraded" to 4-star or vice-versa. It mostly depends on your mood when you first rated the song.

I normally listen to my music in random order and have build a "main smartlist" that combines 100-120 songs each time. The 4-star and 5-star songs have more "weight" in that playlist so that they are more likely to be replayed than the 3-star songs. The 1-star and 2-star songs are excluded from that playlist.

The 1 to 5 star rating is more than adequate for me and I don't think I would be able to judge a song in a range from 1 to 10.

Just my 2 cents.
Thank you.

[mark_h]

I found the 5 star rating too limiting and now use a 1-10 rating system in my MC setup.  I simply added a field 'My Rating' and display this in all views.  Works perfectly.

To initially populate the 'my ratings' I simply copied the 'rating' field into 'my rating' and then did a search a replace in 'my rating' with 5 becoming 9, 4 becoming 7, 3 - 5, 2-3, 1-1.  Over time I started regrading the tracks over the entire 1-10 scale.

To rate new tracks I have a smartlist which shows the last track played and two of each 'my rating' from 1 to 10.  This allows me to compare the last played track against others I've rated and give it an accurate rating.

[edit]
I also have tags:
Never Play - the track is never played
Album Play only - the track is only played if I play the entire album
[/edit]

Finally, my general playback smartlist is based around this rating system, selecting higher rated tracks in preference to lower rated tracks and also playing higher rated tracks more frequently than lower rated tracks.  Higher rated tracks are allowed to be played more frequently, based on [last played] whereas lower rated tracks are played less frequenlty, again based on [last played].  The result is a random playlist skewed towards my preferred tracks but with lower rated tracks thrown in from time to time to keep things fresh.

I *love* MC 

Mark

[hit_ny]

To rate new tracks I have a smartlist which shows the last track played and two of each 'my rating' from 1 to 10.  This allows me to compare the last played track against others I've rated and give it an accurate rating.

Not sure i follow here, if you were listening to a new album from genre x, how does the smartlist help ?

[mark_h]

It helps because you know your music and the smartlist simply serves to refresh your memory as to your voting tendancies allowing you to more accurately vote for the new music.

And it would of course be totally possible to tailor the smartlist to support specific genres if required.

Mark

[EpF]

I found the 5 star rating too limiting and now use a 1-10 rating system in my MC setup.  I simply added a field 'My Rating' and display this in all views.  Works perfectly.

I find it limiting too, and would do something like this except that I really like the graphic nature of the native rating field. I'd love to see the graphic field opened up to us users, so we could change the number of stars, and especially to create our own graphic rating fields.  I have Artist Rating and Album Rating fields, which I would love to convert to graphic; you could specify different images in the Skin folder based on field name, like [Artist Rating].png, or whatever.

I think that a half-star system would be better than a 1-10 system; looking at a rake of files with up to 10 stars would start to become a bit meaningless with lots of files, though a 10 system would still work fine in smartlists and viewschemes.

[hit_ny]

I have Artist Rating and Album Rating fields, which I would love to convert to graphic; you could specify different images in the Skin folder based on field name, like [Artist Rating].png, or whatever.

yep, you could create or substitiute your own jpegs.

How does your Artist rating field, differ from a track rating or the default rating currently ?

Album rating, i assume is either an avg or a text entry good, ok etc.

I think that a half-star system would be better than a 1-10 system; looking at a rake of files with up to 10 stars would start to become a bit meaningless with lots of files, though a 10 system would still work fine in smartlists and viewschemes.

Right, which is why i think a half star rating is more likely to be acceptable. Thing is tho, if you have a different rating field, how would this play with portables ?

Sure you could select in MC what you want transferred over, but then it would just be a bunch of files on the protable, no way to go the other way around atm. Ratings are not std yet.

It helps because you know your music and the smartlist simply serves to refresh your memory as to your voting tendancies allowing you to more accurately vote for the new music.

I find Locate->Artist quite helpful in this way. See how i rated the track (if it's a dupe) previously.

[TimB]

I guess I'm not a good subject for this, I use just two ratings: no stars and 5 stars.

-=Tim=-

[tcman41]

10 star rating was a generalization, ya looking at 10 stars would be a little silly and probably take up too much screen space, just a simple number from 1 to 10 would be best.

As stated before, there is probably all ready a way to do this with smartlists and such,  the problem is that i am not that smart, lol.

TC 

[ama_mmmc]

I would not be pleased if they put in a 1 to 10 rating system as I am almost done with rating 1 to 5.  That would mean I would have to change every file except the 1's

drew

[hit_ny]

It would be trivial for a user to change to a 10 star system,  assuming all you have to do is double the rating. A smartlist to pick 2 stars, modify to 4 in the action window and so on till 5 stars.

If they keep it 5 stars and introduce half ratings, you just keep what you have anyway, the half rating is optional.

[BartMan01]

1=Nevere want to hear it again / can't imagine myself wanting to put that song on again under any circumstance (equals to mark to delete)
2=Good just enough to not to be deleted/nothing special/average/may like it one day
3=I definately like it, memorable
4=I'm lovin' it
5=Can't get enough of it!

Mine is similar
4/5 favorites - broken out for play list grouping with 5 being absolute favorites and 4 being close seconds (listen to 5 only or listen to 4+5)
3 = Good, but not a 'favorite'
2 = OK, but don't normally want to listen to (marginal songs or those 'filler' segments on albums (like the 1 minute bridge pieces that are short and pointless out of the context of the album itself).
1 = Never play (reserved for songs I hate or duplicates from other albums).

[EpF]

How does your Artist rating field, differ from a track rating or the default rating currently ?

Album rating, i assume is either an avg or a text entry good, ok etc.

Both Artist and Album Ratings are semicolon delimited lists of numbers 1-5. I decided to keep them the same as the native rating system.

I rate artists and albums based on my opinion, rather than averaging their track-ratings. As a result all my track ratings are becoming contextual, which is my way of dealing with 5 intervals not being enough: a 4-star track on a 2-star album is not as good as a 4-star track on a 4-star album; same goes for artist ratings, so the best tracks in my collection are 5-5-5, obviously!

[hit_ny]

a 4-star track on a 2-star album is not as good as a 4-star track on a 4-star album;  so the best tracks in my collection are 5-5-5, obviously!

I can understand the album rating giving an indication of how good the other tracks on the album are.

But isn't a 4 star track a 4 star track anyways, ie pretty good ?...or is your track rating relative to how good you felt the album was. In which case is it possible that duplicates with same artist & name receive different track ratings because you felt the albums were different. In my case there is sometimes a slight diff but its a half rating to a full, not more.

Also what would your artist rating for above 2 tracks be in this case ?

[Jaqqe]

1=Nevere want to hear it again / can't imagine myself wanting to put that song on again under any circumstance (equals to mark to delete)
2=Good just enough to not to be deleted/nothing special/average/may like it one day
3=I definately like it, memorable
4=I'm lovin' it
5=Can't get enough of it!

Exactly like my thoughts.

Allthough I like the 5 star system more.

[rhom]

ok i must be odd, i don't rate my music and i deleted it (rating) from everything in MC, same with genre.  i usually just play everything and randomise it.  if i don't like something enough i usually delete it.

[mobyfrag]

I find it limiting too...
but just 1 to 6 rating system would be perfect for me. Moreover, it is the intermediary of the various solutions suggested! The ultimate solution?? lol 

[Mr ChriZ]

ok i must be odd, i don't rate my music and i deleted it (rating) from everything in MC, same with genre.  i usually just play everything and randomise it.  if i don't like something enough i usually delete it.

Thats pretty much what I do :-)
I don't tend to randomize it I just a pick an album for the moment.
I know when I pick it whether I'm gonna like it or not :-)
I don't trust yesterdays me to get it right!

[mark_h]

Problem for me is I've got over 1000 albums from my lifetime collection on a hard drive and it's often difficult to choose what to listen to.  By using ratings from 1-10 and some extensive smartlists I can create my own personal shows geared towards whatever I fancy at the time, whether one genre, live music, soundtracks, general mixes, great stuff, rarely played stuff, b-sides, etc etc.

I found 1-5 too restrictive for the above and migrated to 1-10.  And now perhaps 1-10 could be expanded to something wider

Mark

[dcwebman]

I never used the rating before. Then a couple weeks ago I thought why not and I just started trying to do something with it. Out of an album I rated the hits or almost hits with 5 stars or less. It's not like when I was a teenager and I could tell you the name of a song and probably most of its lyrics. Now it's "who does that song?" when hearing it on the radio so at least rating it this way I don't have to remember the name.  Oh, I also rate while I listen to it and 5 stars is more than enough in my case.

[EpF]

But isn't a 4 star track a 4 star track anyways, ie pretty good ?...or is your track rating relative to how good you felt the album was. In which case is it possible that duplicates with same artist & name receive different track ratings because you felt the albums were different.

I try to rate tracks based on their rank on the album, same as I try to rate albums based on their rank in an artist's oeuvre; so tracks that appear on other compilations could get different ratings if I was really brutal about it, but I check for duplicates with different tags on a regular basis, so I iron these out - otherwise it would get pretty messy.

Also what would your artist rating for above 2 tracks be in this case ?

It all starts with artist rating. The two tracks above could be by the same artist - David Bowie has made some bad albums, but he's great. A good example of how this rating system works is:

Artist: David Bowie - 4 stars

Album: Hunky Dory - 5 stars
Track: Quicksand - 4 stars

Album: Let's Dance - 2 stars
Track: Let's Dance - 4 stars

I think 'Quicksand' is a better song than 'Let's Dance', but in its own shallow way, 'Let's Dance' is a great track! Typically, the high-scoring tracks on low-scoring albums or by low-scoring artists are more commercial and inconsequential, but I love them anyway - like 'She Sells Sanctuary' by The Cult or 'I Got 5 On It' by Luniz.

Heh - I even toyed with the idea of a Genre Rating at one point, but it just seemed like too blunt an instrument to be useful.

Ultimately, great tracks are great tracks, whatever the reason. There was a time when I thought rating tracks was way too geeky and clinical - until I got an MP3 walkman! It really helps when it comes to honing just which great tracks get transferred, and now I find it very handy when I just want to listen to random mixes of my favourite stuff, artists or albums 

[hit_ny]

I try to rate tracks based on their rank on the album, same as I try to rate albums based on their rank in an artist's oeuvre;

rank on the album ? album rank in an oeuvre ?

Where/How do you determine these ranks ?

It all starts with artist rating. The two tracks above could be by the same artist - David Bowie has made some bad albums, but he's great.

Is your Artist Rating assigned rather than derived ?

ie, you give a rating based on reviews, reputation etc.

In which case how do you assign an Artist rating for one that you're unfamiliar with ? or maybe several like in VA compilations.

I'm coming at this in the opposite direction, i let the tracks tell me how much i like an album. Then by looking at album scores by said album artist, i get an idea of how much i like the Artist. I'm not sure how i could  derive an Artist Rating from that or how useful it would be.

The most useful criteria i have found for selecting or limiting album choices remains the album score. These scores are sometimes at odds, at what might be a high selling album or what the critics make of it or the opposite.

[EpF]

rank on the album ? album rank in an oeuvre?
Where/How do you determine these ranks?

They're my opinion - not some predetermined statistic from some online database. If I give an album 4 stars, that's its rank.

Is your Artist Rating assigned rather than derived?

Yes, as above.

ie, you give a rating based on reviews, reputation etc.

No! Based on listening to them!

In which case how do you assign an Artist rating for one that you're unfamiliar with?

Usually, if it's someone I don't know and I have 5 or 6 tracks, I'll wait til I've rated the tracks, but sometimes I just rate the artist on whether they sound like they mean it or not! A cousin of mine 'lent' me a load of music of his, and there are a lot of Nu Metal albums in there. For the moment, unless there's something special (hasn't happened yet, I have to say), they're all getting 2 stars after listening to 1 or 2 songs, which means they're better than Bon Jovi, but not as good as AC/DC.

or maybe several like in VA compilations.

Then album rating comes first. I have a couple of MC expressions that give me either Artist or Album in one pane, depending on whether the album is by one artist or many.

I'm coming at this in the opposite direction, i let the tracks tell me how much i like an album. Then by looking at album scores by said album artist, i get an idea of how much i like the Artist.

Yeah, that's how I used to do it, but I got fed up with the restrictiveness of the 5-star system. Changing to this 'contextual' approach was my way of expanding the rating system; the same way that this 1-10 suggestion would. I might not have done this if there was a more sophisticated track-rating system. A system which went up in half points to 5 would be great or one that progressed like the member ratings on this board and change colour, so you have a 1 yellow star ranked higher than a 5 green star track.

The most useful criteria i have found for selecting or limiting album choices remains the album score.

Are these 'scores' industry figures?

[hit_ny]

Are these 'scores' industry figures?

It's an average derived from the track ratings of that album.

I think i understand what you are doing now. If you wanted to hear good tracks from good artists a smartlist based on rank would pull those out. The artist rank gives you little more control on what gets selected.

I prolly have 10x more artists than albums or only a tenth of the artists i have, are album artists too. It would be difficult to do artist ratings manually, derived from an average of all track ratings made by said artist, maybe if they introduce a SUM & AVG expressions.

[hit_ny]

http://www.omninerd.com/2006/02/10/articles/47

Ha!, version 6.0.2 of iTunes, has the ability to see half-star ratings

[GHammer]

Giggle.

I spend much more time listening.
I rate things mainly so I can have 30% (or so) >4 and 70% (or so) unrated in my playlist.

I like to hear new things. Weighting 'Favs' to play more often than other selections gets pretty close to a Top 40 station in my opinion.

I don't need to rate artists. I know by now that I like Blonde on Blonde better than F4.
As I said, immaterial to me. I use ratings to exclude more than include.

[mesue]

Well here's my system for what it's worth...

No rating = Hubby's music, spoken/comedy/country; stuff I never want to hear in mixes but want to stay in my collection for some reason.
1 = collectible stuff (rarities/demos/b-sides), but I usually don't want to hear it in mixes. Some special occasion/party music.
2 = stuff I might want to listen to on occasion, but usually not in mixes. It might be the less-liked songs from an album where I like other songs; or music I liked at one time in my life, but have since outgrown; or hubby's favorites that I don't mind so much but wouldn't listen to by myself.
3 = neutral/tolerable rating; either I have not listened to it, or I listened and it didn't jump out at me as something I especially liked or disliked. Mix filler.
4 = Favorites
5 = Best Favorites

Most of my mixes use songs with ratings 3 and up. If I want to listen to something different and I'm in the mood for doing ratings, I have a smartlist that picks from the 3's I've not played before, and if something jumps out at me… good or bad... I bump it up or down. If it doesn't jump out at me, it's 'tolerable' so it stays a 3.

[hit_ny]

Giggle.

I spend much more time listening.
I rate things mainly so I can have 30% (or so) >4 and 70% (or so) unrated in my playlist.

Which is how i did things when i started out rating. It works for some styles, genres better than others. I found in these circumstances that the tracks rated better if they were part of the album rather than mixed in with others.

Once i got done with that i started looking at trying to match what i felt with the rest of the world. I'd see various scores being thrown round usually on a scale of 1 to 10.

How to convert my ratings to a system like that ?

Let's say for example if you have an album of 10 tracks, what would the individual track ratings have to be for it to score 10/10 ?

I found it was not possible to rate every track 5 stars, i don't have a single album where i can give that much to every track and don't think i ever will hear one. Ok what about 4 stars then , again very few albums if any got all 4 stars.

So i picked what i was left with, i knew which albums were the best (based on the avg album rating) and used this as a basis to define album scores of 1-10.

album score       Rank
3.5+                    10
3.4                      9.5
..
3.0                      7.5
..
2.7                       6

Anything 3.2(avg) & above is considered GOOD...or a rank between 8.5 - 10. These are the albums im usually looking for when going on a trip or when friends ask for recommendations.

I like to hear new things. Weighting 'Favs' to play more often than other selections gets pretty close to a Top 40 station in my opinion.

I don't need to rate artists. I know by now that I like Blonde on Blonde better than F4.
As I said, immaterial to me. I use ratings to exclude more than include.

Yeah i doubt such a system would work for me either. The idea of the half ratings was to more finely decide what was good or not. An album with many 3.5's and no 4's woudl still be a good album. But there is no way to factor this in if there are whole stars only.

[mark_h]

I like to hear new things. Weighting 'Favs' to play more often than other selections gets pretty close to a Top 40 station in my opinion.

Smartlists are your friend.  My general playback smartlist *does* weight my favourites in the way you note above.  However, it also includes another smartlist which sprinkles in newly imported music to the mix - the more recently it was imported the more it gets played.  After a month or so the recently imported tracks fall into the normal weighted playlist.

Mark