[REQ] Sorting by album rating

[witchseason]

Background:
One of my nodes in MM5 is the default 'Albums' node, and the view is set to 'Grid - by album'. This shows all my albums as thumbnails, and beneath each thumbnail is the album title, the album artist, and a rating (number of stars).
This rating appears to be an automatically calculated value, based on an average of the star ratings of the individual tracks on that album (tracks with zero stars are included in this calculation, 'unrated' tracks are ignored).

So - my question:
Is it possible to sort albums in a view according to this automatically calculated average star rating? That value must (I assume) be stored somewhere in the MM5 database, although it's (obviously) not being written to any tracks as a tag so I don't think it's possible to use it as a view or sort filter.

Thanks

[Lowlander]

Album Rating is calculated when displayed, not a stored value. It's also not a field that can be shown as a Column or viewed in Properties.

So, currently you can't sort on Album Rating.

[witchseason]

Thanks, I thought that was the case.
A 'nice to have', nevertheless.

[Peke]

Hi,
I do not see the point of not calculating it. Some tracks I set as 1 Star some tracks I set as 5 stars I get Average rating. I do not see point setting 2.5 stars if MM already calculate it as 2.5.

[bdb484]

I think the idea is that album ratings are just as subjective as track ratings, so users do not necessarily agree with MM's calculation, which is just an objective measure of the mean value of the track ratings.

For instance, I really love "An Empty Bliss Beyond This World" by The Caretaker, even though it doesn't really have any tracks that especially stand out to me. I'd probably rate each song at about 3 or 3.5 stars, but I'd consider it a 4-star album.

Likewise, the pure average approach can really be inadequate when you have an album like Tool's Undertow, which has 9 tracks of music, followed by 59 one-second tracks of silence, followed by another track of music.

If all the music is rated as 5 stars and all the silence is rated as 0 stars, MM returns an album rating of 0.5 stars, which I don't think anyone would agree is a useful rating.

Allowing the user to manually set that rating to 4.5 or 5 stars would solve this problem.

[Peke]

Hi,
I just tested if all silence tracks are rated Unknown then MM ignores them and rate 5 stars for me.

I wonder why would you keep 59 tracks of silence? I Would simply delete them.

[bdb484]

Those are both totally logical workarounds for that specific case, but I can see reasons why people wouldn't like them and I can also imagine lots of other cases where similar problems exist but are not as easily addressed.

I don't know that it needs to be on top of the priority list, but I'd definitely agree with OP that my experience would be enhanced if I could override MM's automatically assigned album ratings.

[Peke]

Hi,
ATM Database structure is not designed to contain Album rating. We will certainly consider expanding in future.

I agree with you to some extend and understand the reason, but doing that big change rise many more questions like which to be default, how to preserve that in tags, what will happen if you rescan files, ...

On other hand maybe I do not understand as I am track based person with hundreds of compilation CDs and albums especially DJ promo ones I got while being more active, so album rating is lower priority on my list. Which do not mean it is someone first priority.

[bdb484]

I totally get it.

I am much more of an album-oriented listener, which is why this sort of thing is important to me. I would guess that I'm probably in the minority, though.

[Peke]

Hi,
Maybe ATM, it is always good to hear other opinions. We always consider new different things.