Subsonic Forum

I'm considering to replace the existing rating system (0 to 5 stars) with a simpler "favorite" system.

With the new scheme the user will be able to specify his/her favorite artists, albums and songs, for instance by toggling on/off a star.

There will also be a new page "My Favorites" listing these artists, albums and songs. This will eventually also be available in the Android app etc.

What do you think? Would this be an improvement or not? Any suggestions, thoughts?

Thanks,
Sindre

I think this may be a much quicker option as right now, if you have a huge library, it can become quite tedious.

I say do it..

A definite yes from me - rating a favourite artist and individual tracks

+1 here as well, then maybe be able to build a playlist automatically by randomizing all favorites

I ready this too quickly and thought it was only going to be at the artist level...being able to "favorite" all the way down to the track level would be awesome. This could also be sent back through to the last.fm "love" and "banned" flags.

i think it would be advantageous to include some sort of negative connotation to tracks, i sometimes run across tracks in my collection that I need to re-rip or weed out and when im out on the road, outside of trying to write down the track name, keep track of that piece of paper and all of that its tough to remember to come back to it.

the main reason i never use the stars is because theres no way(that i know of) to rate individual tracks on the android app. if it was in the android app i would use the stars and just set bad tracks to 1 star.

disgustipated wrote:i think it would be advantageous to include some sort of negative connotation to tracks, i sometimes run across tracks in my collection that I need to re-rip or weed out and when im out on the road, outside of trying to write down the track name, keep track of that piece of paper and all of that its tough to remember to come back to it.

A bomb icon perhaps ?
If we could search for them or they had their own page it would then be easy to find any tracks for editing/deletion.
If the track rating could go into the ID tag (POPM) it would then be available to some external players eg Mediamonkey & WMP

sindre_mehus wrote:I'm considering to replace the existing rating system (0 to 5 stars) with a simpler "favorite" system.
With the new scheme the user will be able to specify his/her favorite artists, albums and songs, for instance by toggling on/off a star.
There will also be a new page "My Favorites" listing these artists, albums and songs. This will eventually also be available in the Android app etc.

This is the best idea ever! I've been thinking about this for ages and was about to program "my own subsonic".
Why: because I only want to see the songs I like, and be able to filter out the off-tracks from the zillion one-hit-wonder albums with the push of a button.

Three remarks:

• It would be nice to maintain the folder structure when the user is in "favorite" mode. I.e. still being able to browse to folder/artist/track when in favorite mode, where I only see the favorite tracks of that particular album. Having one big unordered list of favorites wouldn't help that much (I can create a playlist for that).
• It would be absolutely fabulous if my girlfriend could rate songs seperately. The ratings would need to be assigned to the song AND the user. When she is logged in she sees her favorite songs; when I'm logged in I see my favorite songs. No offense, but I get a little bit fed up with seeing Celine Dion in my archive, hehehe
• Will the ratings still be saved in the ID3 tag of the file? I know a lot of people are paranoid about being dependent on one system, you know.. the what if subsonic's database crashes kind of remark... So I guess it would be best to still store the song's rating (=favorite) in the ID3 tag, and perhaps store a user's specific rating (=favorite) in the ID3 comments tag (see previous comment), unless someone has a better solution for this.

I would love to hear how you feel about this!

How about changing the scheme to a "Like/Dislike" structure? It would be very similar to YouTube's Like/Dislike feature. These two buttons would be present at the song level. The buttons would be placed to the right of the player in the playlist frame. They would also need to be available next to each song in order to change your opinion after the song has finished playing, but I don't know a good place to put them.

In addition, you would have the option to choose whether the "Random" view shows albums or individual songs.

The songs that have the "Like" flag set would show up considerably more often in the "Random" view than those without the "Like" flag set.
The songs with the "Dislike" flag set would rarely if ever show up in the "Random" view.

The "Top Rated" view would be changed to the "Liked" view.
The songs would be ordered by most recently liked first.

This would make it very easy to work with multiple users; next to the "Like/Dislike" buttons would be a count of how many people liked the song.

A new view would be added to the home page called "Popular" and it would show the songs that were played the most and liked the most between all of the users.

[Edit: Wow. Just realized how complicated this would be. I like it just the way it is! ]

BKKKPewsey wrote:If the track rating could go into the ID tag (POPM) it would then be available to some external players eg Mediamonkey & WMP

That is a great idea! I was thinking about where to store the multiple userratings, because I initially thought that POPM would only offer space for *one* rating. But it appears that multiple ratings can be stored directly in the mp3 file I dived into the ID3 spec and it says the following about POPM:

Code: Select all

The purpose of this frame is to specify how good an audio file is.
   Many interesting applications could be found to this frame such as a
   playlist that features better audio files more often than others or
   it could be used to profile a person's taste and find other 'good'
   files by comparing people's profiles. The frame contains the email
   address to the user, one rating byte and a four byte play counter,
   intended to be increased with one for every time the file is played.
   The email is a terminated string. The rating is 1-255 where 1 is
   worst and 255 is best. 0 is unknown. If no personal counter is wanted
   it may be omitted. When the counter reaches all one's, one byte is
   inserted in front of the counter thus making the counter eight bits
   bigger in the same away as the play counter ("PCNT"). There may be
   more than one "POPM" frame in each tag, but only one with the same
   email address.

     <Header for 'Popularimeter', ID: "POPM">
     Email to user   <text string> $00
     Rating          $xx
     Counter         $xx xx xx xx (xx ...)

The best about this is that the ratings of multiple users can be saved directly in the mp3 file!
This is what the Subsonic API function could look like:

setFavorite, Parameters:
id - Song id.
user - User id (Subsonic would need to translate this to the user's email address).
favorite - When 1 favorite will be set (i.e. ID3 POPM rating will be anything between 1..255 for that subsonic user), when 0 favorite will be removed (i.e. ID3 POPM tag will be removed for that user).

This makes the whole favorite system linked to the subsonic user id.

The subsonic API get functions (like getMusicDirectory) could be modified in such a way that when a favoritesOnly parameter is passed to it, only favorite folders/albums/songs are returned *for that user*. Clients can have an option to toggle between favorites and all folders/albums/songs.

Love it! What do you all think

Replacing Ratings with Favorites is a Great Idea, Sindre!

Would we also be able to browse other users' Favorites as well?
Please! Please!

I love the "Bomb" idea as well. It would be great to be able to tag a track or album that has issues such as poor quality or skipping, or such.
It would help to keep the quality of one's collection maintained.

Windows 7 Standalone
5,883 artists
9,561 albums
103,361 songs
474.01 GB (~ 7,363 hours)

It's not clear to me why "favorites" is in any way better than ratings, other than perhaps a simpler interface. It sounds like favorites is just a rating system which only allow ratings of 0 or 1? This sounds like a change which should be limited to the User Interface.

I believe that ratings (0-5 seems common) are appropriate. Perhaps a rating of 0-3 would be shown as an "unselected" favorite, 4-5 shown as a favorite; when checking a favorite box, set the rating to 4, when unchecking it, set the rating to 3? Something along those lines would let ratings coexist with a UI supporting "favorites."

Having used iTunes for a while, it's quite easy to create a dynamic playlist of songs rated, say, 4 or better, which sounds like the equivalent of selecting "favorite" songs. But, I'd also rate songs with problems (poor rip, etc.) as 1 so I could identify and fix them later. I'd use 2 for things like "audience" tracks in a live album, so they wouldn't play in a mix, but would when playing the album, etc. 3 is "OK," 4 is "I like this," 5 is "I really like this." 0 means unrated.

I agree that the tag mentioned here is appropriate. Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of a tag which allowed separate ratings per user. If this POPM tag were used, then a 0-5 rating system would be multiplied by 50 inside the tag (0=0, 1=50,...5=250).

What would also be great would be some form of dynamic playlist support (genre=x, rating>=4, lastplayed>3 months). This is one thing iTunes does right.

Finally, album ratings. This, to me, would be a special case. Only set unrated (rating=0) tracks when setting the rating (or favorite) for an album. Otherwise, you'd end up changing already existing ratings. When displaying an album rating, it should be the average of all rated tracks in the album.

I find the numerical ratings on albums a completely useless feature. Reasons: there is no portable way to export the data and associate it with the files; as others have noted, there are lots of songs in an album and it's really hard to assign a number to them.

I agree that having a way to "like/dislike" or indicate an album is a favorite would be good.

But, this feature is 1000x times less useful than numerical ratings on individual songs. Song ratings is all that is keeping me from moving to Subsonic and donating to the cause. The lack of ratings aside, I am completely blown away by the quality and feature set of Subsonic. It is really amazing, and I've used various programs for as long as there have been mp3s. Nothing can touch Subsonic.

envoy510 wrote:I find the numerical ratings on albums a completely useless feature. Reasons: there is no portable way to export the data and associate it with the files; as others have noted, there are lots of songs in an album and it's really hard to assign a number to them.

I agree that having a way to "like/dislike" or indicate an album is a favorite would be good.

But, this feature is 1000x times less useful than numerical ratings on individual songs. Song ratings is all that is keeping me from moving to Subsonic and donating to the cause. The lack of ratings aside, I am completely blown away by the quality and feature set of Subsonic. It is really amazing, and I've used various programs for as long as there have been mp3s. Nothing can touch Subsonic.

i agree with all of this. i dont use ratings currently because
1.its album specific and not song based
2. no portability ( i use subsonic is mostly a single or two user, i would liek the ratings to be on the individual id3 tags but i see that as unrealistic as some poeple use sunsonic for multi user environments)
3. no way to use the ratings from the remote android player which is primarily what i listen on

while a like/dislike feature i might use when in the android player, i would prefer a fine grained 1-5 rating per track in the android player not a yea/ neigh sort of vote

Why replace them? I think it's better to have both.

Plus it's other functionality that can be integrated with MusicBrainz. Group and individual votes.

http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Rating_System

i would love to see that! it is the number one missing feature for me