Rating by Album and Track [#6692]

[DirtyDave]

+1

what would be interesting is if the stars for the rating have a slightly different appearance for the album like maybe a border or maybe a horizontal bar graph behind the stars that is related to the album score

[samuellbronko]

+1

ive finally come across to media monkey afta so many problems with itunes... ive been searching for a few features that are on itunes that i can locate on mm and this is one that i use very regularly - album ratings...

if itunes can do it, weather it's just in the mm db and not in the id3 tag shldnt be the issue here...

using an average calculation as one user above mentioned doesnt work either... cause 1 track may be 5 stars but it's so fkn brilliant that it carries the value of the whole album upwards... album rating is a conclusion of how you feel about the entire experience from start to finish

please media monkey add this to an update soon!

PS - my only other major issue with mm that itunes has is getting back to the location in the entire library of a track that im currently playing. in itunes, u can click an arrow and "go to artist" view or "go to album" view which will bring you to where the track is in your library... doing a search doesnt work cause i want to see perspective in comparison to my entire collection - hope this makes sense

[dtsig]

+1

[Peke]

NOTE: If MMW library is browsed by Album Art than average Album Rating is calculated.

PS - my only other major issue with mm that itunes has is getting back to the location in the entire library of a track that im currently playing. in itunes, u can click an arrow and "go to artist" view or "go to album" view which will bring you to where the track is in your library... doing a search doesnt work cause i want to see perspective in comparison to my entire collection - hope this makes sense

Right click on any track and select Find more from Same ->

EDIT: I added two more bugs to clarify this http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=11896 and http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=11897

[samuellbronko]

NOTE: If MMW library is browsed by Album Art than average Album Rating is calculated.

PS - my only other major issue with mm that itunes has is getting back to the location in the entire library of a track that im currently playing. in itunes, u can click an arrow and "go to artist" view or "go to album" view which will bring you to where the track is in your library... doing a search doesnt work cause i want to see perspective in comparison to my entire collection - hope this makes sense

Right click on any track and select Find more from Same ->

thanks for this little right-click option! i knew there would be an easy way... as mentioned im only new to MM so still figuring it out - thanks heaps!

have just installed the discogs auto-tag script which has been great since i have a lot of bits in my library that are on discogs and not amazon.

however album rating would be the cherry on the pie now to make MM better than anything else!

[just_any_1]

I have wished for this for quite some time. Seems like it can't / won't be made to happen. What I've started doing is right click on an album in the tree, Properties. In the field Album Comment I add something like Billboard Top 200 #21. You can create a list there of other terms. Then create an AutoPlaylist with Criteria of Album Comment that contains Billboard.

Not what we want but better than nothing.

[paulyphonica]

It has long been a desire of mine to be able to effectively rate an entire album and use the album's rating in things like auto playlists. I took a look at Magic Nodes and thought that it might fit the bill, but it doesn't seem to.

Here's what I am looking to do.

Scenario #1: Say I just bought a Pat Metheny album with 10 tracks. One track I don't care for, so it is a 2-star rating. Two of them I haven't rated yet, two have 3-star ratings, three tracks have 4-stars, and one has 5 stars. So out of the tracks I've rated, the album has an average rating of about 3.5 stars.

Scenario #2: I have another album, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, that I just want to rate as 5-stars all at once, because it is my favorite album of all time, it should typically be played from beginning to end, and it makes no sense to rate individual tracks, because the album itself is legendary.

So now I want to have an auto play list which selects all tracks on my favorite albums, such that if an album rates 3 or higher, then all tracks from the album would appear in the playlist based on the album's overall rating, This way I can ensure that I always have the full album. This is helpful when the tracks flow into one another and I don't want to break the flow even if I don't like a track. It is also helpful if I want to take the whole album on my MediaMonkey mobile app so I can rate tracks I haven't rated yet. Or share the album with a friend on a road trip.

I know that the album itself in MediaMonkey doesn't have attributes like tags or ratings, but in theory this could still be done programmatically.

For scenario #1, in theory you could have the concept of "album rating" being an average of all rated tracks on the album, and then include this as an operator in the queries used by auto play lists. So in addition to the Track Rating you could have Album Rating. So a sample play list would have a condition to include all tracks with an album rating of 3.5 or higher, and since every track on this album would meet that criteria, all tracks would be in the playlist, even the 2-star song and the two tracks I haven't rated yet. So I could then create more playlists that refer to this one if desired. For example, I could have a child playlist that included all songs on the parent play list except those with fewer than 2 stars. This would allow me to rate tracks as low, but still include on the full album play, and rate other tracks so low that they wouldn't show up at all. The possibilities go on, you get the picture.

For scenario #2, you could show the "album rating" in the carousel view or the now playing view. Then if the user clicks on the album rating, you could use the selected rating as the base rating for all tracks on the album. The logic could be a bit tricky though... if they already rated several tracks as a 5 and then they rate the album as a 4, you could set the minimum rating of all tracks as a 4, but then the automatically calculated rate would actually be higher. You probably wouldn't want this feature to reduce the rating of a track you've already rated. But this subtlety could be figured out, and if not, then scenario #1 would still be a great capability to have.

One thing you'd probably want to consider in the album rating is how many tracks or what percentage of tracks would be sufficient to average the album rating. For example, if I have 10 tracks on an album and only one of them has been rated, and it is a 5, then this could mean I love the album and this is my favorite track, the other ones I haven't rated yet, or it could be that this is the only one I've listened to enough to rate yet, or it could be that I really can't stand most of the album and this is the one track I would even bother to listen to, but it's a favorite. Point is, perhaps some minimum number or percentage of tracks on the album need to be rated for it to have an album rating at all, otherwise the album would appear as unrated. These thresholds could be user configurable. For album ratings, allow the user to include unrated tracks in the rating, and what default rating to assume, and a minimum number and minimum percentage of the album to be rated before an album gets an album rating assigned.

Another possibility is to actually create a new database record for the album, but I don't know if that would be a great option. Since album is a loose concept determined solely by the value of the Album tag on the track itself, it would probably be more trouble than it is worth to try and track the album itself as a real entity.

[paulyphonica]

Magic Nodes add-on has several nodes within its Album Ratings group, e.g. "Albums with avg. track rating >= 4 stars", "Albums with avg. track ratings >= 3 and less than 4" and so on. Each album within those nodes has displayed the average rating next to its name. Albums also could be sorted by that value (if you modify Sort by quelifier), and you could also add your own nodes with similar filters and/or different sub-nodes.

RegExp Find & Replace add-on has the preset "Assign weighted average Rating of album to <Into Field>..." where you could define into which field you want to store that information, e.g. Custom 1. Of curse, using this preset you would get all tracks from some album with same "Album rating" value.

Honestly, I cannot see a point for users to enter such information manually. In my opinion, this is something which should be automatically calculated based on individual Track Rating values. Let say that I have one album with one track rated 5 stars and 6 tracks rated 2 stars each. I think it is most convenient to rate such album using average ratings of all such tracks (5 + 6 * 2) / 7 = 2.42 stars. Even more better, you could use the weighted average ratings where longer tracks has greater weight in calculation. For example, if I have one album with one track of 20 minutes rated 5 stars and 6 tracks of approx. 4 minutes rated 2 stars each, the weighted average would be (20 * 5 + 6 * 4 * 2) / (20 + 6 * 4) = 3.36 stars.

Thanks, we're on the same page with the Magic Nodes add-in, except that unless I am mistaken you cannot query the Magic Nodes from an auto-playlist.

I had not tried the RegExp Find & Replace add-on, and it sounds like this would do what I want, except that as a side effect if you are auto-writing your tags, then any time you change the rating of one track on the album you'll need to save tags to every file on the album for this to stick. Not crazy about that, though it could be fine if you aren't writing the tags. At least this is something that could be incorporated into auto playlists.

As for the final point on average rating, I agree that the manual album rating is probably a less useful feature. I think there could be a lot of different algorithms for averages; could include unrated tracks as 0 or as 3 or as a configurable number or could exclude them from the calculation... the rating could take into account a minimum number of tracks having a rating... so if what I really want is a "favorite album" then this for me could mean "any album with at least three tracks with four or more stars"... it starts to get dizzying and may come at the cost of usability (and readability of this forum thread) to debate the algorithm itself. I think perhaps the salient point of this is that it would be worth expanding the capabilities of the auto playlist to have a more robust querying capability, and to support the idea of something being contained under another node, including magic nodes, not just other playlists. And then to be able to use more advanced logic and operators, perhaps in a more SQL-like language.

[Jolls]

I 2nd the idea of having an "Album Rating" attribute that can be included in Auto-Filters. I REALLY want this. But it would also be nice to have a 2nd attribute that lists the "Album Last Played" which could be the lowest date value of the tracks on the album. I absolutely love AutoFilters and use it to sync playlists to my phone on a daily basis; typically by Rating and Last Played for songs. I've wanted to able to do something similar with whole albums: make a playlist of all 4+ Album Ratings (which would include all songs on album, even if song is 3 star), sorted by "Album Last Played", then by Album, then by Track.

[MMFrLife]

+1

[rosswf22]

I would love to a rating system that take into account each songs rating and then add it up to an overall cumulative rating for the album itself...

[Peke]

This can be easily done in Scripts and in MM5 that can be even easier