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[tcman41]

This could be a silly question, but is there a way to rate entire albums as opposed to individual tracks?. My entire collection is album oriented and i am only interested in ratings on a per album basis, you know, 5 star albums good, 1 star albums bad and thus would be able to sort and group them accordingly.

Thanks
TC

[Mr ChriZ]

Sure is.
If you select an album and then bring up Tag Info (Press Alt and Enter to get there quick!)
Theres a rating field.  Set it to the rating you want...
and Hey Presto!

[tcman41]

Ok great, saw that but wasn't sure, does it produce one rating for one album or does it just rate every track the same rating?

Thanks

TC

[zxsix]

You're technically still rating the tracks, but do this:

Click on Audio > Albums.
then
Audio > Options > Details.

Here you will see all of the albums and their rating.


Also in smartlists, you can just use   [Rating]=5 ~a    since all the tracks carry the rating.   That will select all full albums that have a rating of 5.

[hit_ny]

umm..i'm not on 11.1 yet.

Are you saying the album rating given is an avg of track ratings ?

[zxsix]

Yes, in that particular view I mentioned.

[hit_ny]

Is there any way to sort a library by album score and display the result in a smartlist or viewscheme ?

[zxsix]

Not at this time.
Only this new view, which isn't highly customizable yet.
The functions aren't there to do an 'average' calculation for smartlists so we can't do it there.

[tcman41]

The reply:

Not at this time.
Only this new view, which isn't highly customizable yet.
The functions aren't there to do an 'average' calculation for smartlists so we can't do it there.

what is this new view you are talking about?, all this still seems track rating based and isn't really what i am after. I think i will go back to my old method of making a favorites playlist and have it displayed as albums per a smartlist routine.

I keep thinking that there must be better and cooler ways of doing things inside of MC11 and perhaps i am getting ahead of the program releases and/or just overthinking too much, that happens to me a lot, lol.

TC

[zxsix]

The reply:

what is this new view you are talking about?

Click on Audio > Albums.
then
Audio > Options > Details.

This was added about 5 builds ago.  You'll get 1 line item per album and the rating field there will be an average of all the tracks on the album.  There's your album rating.

, all this still seems track rating based and isn't really what i am after. I think i will go back to my old method of making a favorites playlist and have it displayed as albums per a smartlist routine.

Well, yes.  Each record in the MC database is a track, not an album, so naturally the ratings will be at the track level.  Album ratings would have to be an average of this.

We had suggested that you set all of your tracks to the same rating.  There's your album rating.  It can be displayed in this view I mentioned as the average of the track ratings.  It can also be seen in a view scheme or playlist using that code I posted earlier.  With that code, it's actually using the rating of the first track on the album, but then making sure that all tracks for the album are included.  So, either way, as long as you rate all tracks per album the same, you have multiple ways of doing what you want.


I keep thinking that there must be better and cooler ways of doing things inside of MC11 and perhaps i am getting ahead of the program releases and/or just overthinking too much, that happens to me a lot, lol.

TC

[hit_ny]

Album ratings is a feature that's been asked for a lot. There has not been a satisfactory way of doing it as yet. Best attempt was back in 11.0 where you could use the library browser. But then there was no way to specify what you wanted, it was everything whether an album score was relevant or not.

I implemented this manually back in 10.0, its a very useful feature and makes finding bestof's very easy.

I've been toying with the idea of a time weighted album score thinking its (slightly) more accurate than a plain track average rating. Taking the time of the tracks converted to seconds and averaging over the total album time (in seconds). Gives you a better idea of how the time spent listening to an album would be like.

This is something a computer could do way faster than manually.

eg.
An album of 4 tracks
1  of duration 50s and a rating of 2 stars and the other 3 of duration 10s with a rating of 3 stars.

Time weighted album scores
2(50) 3(10) 3(10) 3(10)
avg        - 2.78 ---> 2.8
avg (time) - 2.38 ---> 2.4

same setup again but this time with a 4 star track.
4(50) 3(10) 3(10) 3(10)
avg        - 3.25 ---> 3.3
avg (time) - 3.63 ---> 3.6

So in both cases avg score would produce erroneous album scores compared to a time weighted one.

[tcman41]

Whoaaa!, that last post pretty much blows my mind, lol. Isn't the rating just another number in the database, it seems to me that it would be easy to calculate an average rating for all the tracks on an album and even have it based on a  scale of 1 to 10.

I really appreciate all the replys and such, i am not trying to be a dick or anything just trying to get the most out of MC11 which is quickly becoming one of my all time favorite pieces of software, considering how long i have messing around with computers, that's saying something, lol.

Thanks
TC