Hi to people from all over the world who love to listen music (hope I don't post in the wrong forum..)

Most of music player app today have feature to "rate" your song. At first I don't use it but recently I consider to rate them too.

But how do you "Judge" your music anyway? Of course, I know what music I like or music that I don't like. But I find it hard to convert that felling to rate them as a "star" 1 to 5 rating scale commonly use. If I like the song I give them 5 and if I don't like it I give them 1 or not at all. but what about 2-4 star? 4 star is a bit more easy (still difficult anyway) cause some time I find song that like it a lot but may not really my favorite style then I give them 4. But 2-3 star are hard to give.. I just can't decided.

So, how you judge your music to scale of 1-5 ? Maybe I can decide if I see how another people judge there song as an example.

Cheers.

EDIT: Erm.. people , PLEASE be as specific as you can. How you define "avarage" and "so-so" or "love" and "like" ? This is the point why I'm asking this. Thank you for your understanding.

I "keep it simple".

4=songs I like
5=songs I love

I don't use 1&2. I use foo_skip to mark songs I do not want to hear, so low ratings do not have a practical use for me.

I use 3 for songs I find interesting but have not settled on a full opinion on whether they "rate" or not.

I've been playing around with "hotness", lately, and find it to be "working" quite well. If only there was a way to create Autoplaylists with the Hotness script......

Why do you have songs you don't like in your collection?

in the playlist:
5 = super, favourite
4 = very good, i like it
3 = average song, but I want to keep it in the playlist

not in the playlist:
2 = so-so. I don't want to listen to it regularly now. maybe later.
1 = I don't like it very much, but want to keep it in my collection.
0 = I don't like it at all. Can be safely deleted.

To have a complete collection of albums

i like: stays on disk
i dislike: recycle bin (can re-rip later if my taste magically changes)

I experienced 2 methods :

1st method

***** favourites
**** good songs
*** songs I want to keep for random listening

then with playlist

- play only *****
- play only *****+**** (larger collection)
- play only *****+****+*** (very much larger collection)

2nd method (styles, tempo or mood)

***** rock, house, rap
**** reggae
*** folk, ballads
*** ambient, soundtracks, triphop
** jazz, vocal jazz
* party songs : boney m, abba, etc...

I use the 3-star system:

*** : Good songs, will definitely listen to again
** : Mediocre songs, won't mind listening to them sporadically
* : Hate these songs, should NEVER be played again
(no rating: unrated)

This rating style works REALLY well for me, because it simply categories my collection into songs which i prefer, which i tolerate, and which i hate. It's highly effective when used in conjunction with play counts, last played and first played information.

I never understood what this rating thing is good for, maybe someone can tell me. It's just for fun, is it? I know by myself what I currently like or dislike. No need for file tags.

In the past, i just plain and simply used a "balanced" scoring scale in that 3 would equal to "average". At that time, my scoring system would be like:

1. i hate it. The kind of song which i always want to skip.
2. i dislike it but its tolerable. I'm not really impressed, but it doesn't annoy me.... "below average".
3. Average. The track is okay. I'm neither significantly impressed by it, nor do i find it low quality. Its the kind of "good filler track". Something which is not much exceptional, but also not bad, but just "solid".
4. I like it. I wont go raving about it, but i definatelly really like it.
5. Top-track.


After a while, i noticed two things:
1. I delete or skip any 2-star songs anyway. I'm not an album-listener - i only listen to tracks which i like. But for that purpose, i dont need two values, but just one!

2. I have tracks which are "over the top". A very low amount of tracks, which are not just favorite tracks but that kind of "all-time best". For this, i would 6-star rating-scale..... but the "official" rating-scale as well as most displays expect a 5-star scale.

So, i just transposed my rating-scheme one star down, so that 2 would be average, and 5 would be "over the top". However, this seems a bit unintuitive, so i'm pondering the idea of using a 6-star scale anyways.

The BIGGEST advantage of rating songs is when making autoplaylists; this alone makes rating files worth the "hassle".

A 'side-effect' is when you need to fill a portable with your favorite tracks; you can "semi-automate" the process if you have rated your songs.

I kind of look at by album
4 best 1 or 2 tracks on an album
3 songs I wont skip
2 songs I might skip
1 never play does not go on portable

5 is reserved for songs I turn up when I hear them

I review my 4s occasioanly and promote to 5

Some of us like to collect music for the sake of collecting music. Hell, I have thousands of tracks I haven't even had time to listen to yet.

What he said.

And anyway, my musical preferences change day-to-day and hour-to-hour depending on my mood or what I'm doing or whatever music I heard recently, etc.

as kanak pointed already, if your listening habits are based mostly on mix tracks from different albums, it's
good to know what songs match a certain criteria, maybe there's more to it what i'm not aware of.
But if you choose your music based on any other tag info, or your memory, than there is no need for ratings.

My listening habit is pretty weird actually.

First, I can listen to all kind of music. (minus boyband pop music..) from the old classical to the most sick song today can offer. (Sick in music, NOT sick in compression..) So it's hard to thought up my own standard for a broad type of music.

And most of the time (90%) if not count when I'm going to sleep, I just set playback order to repeat track and abuse some song until I get really bored or my mood call for it. Then manually change to another song myself. and repeat the cycle. So I can't judge them base on "Do I want to hear them in random/shuffle?" This is one reason I have mod my foo to look pretty shiny (and speedy too), cause I LOOKING at it very often.

Yes.. I consider rating my song so that I can get these library thingy to action! all I can do with it right now is to call a song from some simple tag criteria that doesn't really useful for me.

I start to think that "Rating" may not really useful to me. Since I have somewhat good memory so I can remember is this song good or not and how good is it without seeing rating tag. But sometime it does have some usefulness as a marker for "possibly good" song that I might listen to it later.

Maybe I will have to go through the pain of manually tag my files with information like speed,mood,style (I don't have any of this..) to really get something useful out of this. But I just too damn lazy.

Just because I dislike a particular song on an album doesn't mean I don't want to listen to the entire album en masse.

Also, just because I don't like a song or album doesn't mean that I don't have friends who might want to listen to it when they are over.

I rate my songs by giving them a 5 star rating or nothing at all. I then have a smart playlist setup in iTunes so that all of my 5 star rated songs are automatically added to that playlist. I also randomize the playlist and sync it to my 16GB iPod touch. I give a song a 5 star rating whether it is one of my favorites or not. I judge music based on what I like. I listen to a lot of metal (and all of its sub-genres) so judging songs is rather easy. Many average metal artists will follow the popular trend or the songs will sound repetitive (ie hitting the snare over and over again while using double bass pedals and screaming). To me, an average song would be something from Bullet For My Valentine as their first album followed the popular scream, sing, scream, sing metal formula. A great album would be any of Korn's (of course) releases or some of the classics such as Judas Priest's Painkiller.

I used to have it setup where I would rate a song using different star ratings but then it all got a little complex when making a smart playlist as there were some 2 star songs that I wouldn't mind listening to again and there were some 2 star songs that I didn't want to listen to (even though they weren't bad, I just grew tired of them). That is why I switched to the 5 star or nothing rating.
Edit:
I just wanted to add that I keep full albums on my computer's hard drive and I keep the songs that aren't rated. I do this because I am always discovering new songs on older albums. Just the other day I was listening through Flaw's Endangered Species album and found 4 songs that I like and didn't rate yet I purchased this album back in 2004 when it was first released.

I use a script I developed to set the ratings. It's a kind of AutoRating which depends on how much you listened a song in total, how much per day, when you listened to it the last time and how much you skipped the song. The script uses a (adjustable) formula to calculate the rating.

You can also say how much stars so you want. I use stars from 1.5-5 stars.

Please Share!!!

So do you run the script manually every now and then? How does it work?

Same here and I would like to here more about your script too.

Big Bernie's script is here @ the mediamonkey forums.

It works really well but it depends also what goals your trying accomplish with it.

I use iTunes and tend to rate things on the iPod as I listen to them. First, I only rate popular music. I don't bother rating electronic, jazz or classical music, showtunes or comedy. I take a slightly different approach:

5 - Radio Hit
4 - Song I really like that never made it on the radio
3 - Average Song
2 - Song I dislike
1 - To be deleted
0 - I haven't listened to it yet

I make my smart playlists accordingly, e.g.

Hitlist - All five star songs
Mixlist - Songs greater than three stars, not in the recently played playlist
Unrated - All songs with no rating
Neglected - All songs with no rating, a zero playcount, not in the recenly added playlist

It works quite well actually.

Thanks.

So Big_Berny's formula is:



That's quite interesting. I can't wait to try it out.

Mine is in CVS if anybody is interested. The implenetation is in iTSfv for iTunes users.

Is this the correct usage of the formular Big_Bernie? I'd love to incorporate another algorithm as an option for iTunes users to autorate.



Cheers,
McoreD

My method, exactly.

I've toyed recently with the idea of using "most played" tracking in my player to show me which songs I really listen to the most, and then place them into a "favorites" playlist. But I already have such a playlist (managed manually, as I do everything else), and whether a song is played often will not mean anything in terms of my preference, as I leave music playing all the time while I'm in and out of my office all day. Songs that play the most may or may not "rate" higher than lesser played tracks.

So I'll stick with the simplest and best method for me. If I like it, it stays. If I don't, it dies. If I change my mind, I can always resurrect it with EAC.

Song ratings are of as little importance to me as genres. There's what I like and there's what I don't, and never the 'tween shall meet.

Right, the script I mentioned is for MediaMonkey. And it's right that manual ratings may be more accurate. But it works quite good here. And I also like that the ratings get adjusted with the time because dayssniceadded and maybe daysssincelastplayed increase.

Btw the formula you posted is still experimental, the one used in the script is another one. And you can't just use it to calculate the rating directly. The script first calculates points of each song with the formula and puts it in a list. Then it sorts the list by these points and gives the 2% with the highest points 5-stars, the next 6% of the songs get 4.5-stars and so on. The ranges can be defined in the options of the script.

So it's a little more complicated than this.

Regards
Big_Berny

I rate by how often I want to listen to the track.
I create autoplayists in itunes:
***** not played in 1 month
**** not played in 2 months
*** not played in 6 months
anything less I never listen to and no stars still have to be rated.

Sometimes I'll also through in a recently added 5 star playlist that refreshes weekly since the songs are new.


It's pretty convenient and I usually never have to manually make playlists.

i dislike ratings because they almost always mess with tags and that messes with bittorrent.

usually i want to listen to a specific band/genre, anyway.

here's my system:
0 = filler/not a song/skip
1 = bad/meh/nothing special
2 = good
3 = great
4 = rare gem

i mostly just use 2 and 3.

I think I can thought up my own standard now..

5 = I like every thing about it.
4 = I like the music just as the 5 star rating but there's something pull it down. like bad mixing, too short, too long and contain a bit boring part, ETC. OR Very good music&sound but not just my favorite style.
3 = Like 4 + it's my favorite style of song but the music is just so-so.
2 = Like 3 but it's not my favorite style.
1 = Disappoint.. but still worth my time to give it 1 star.
0 = I don't listen or rate it yet, OR it JUST PLAIN SUCK.

Should be pretty good now..

There are some really good methods here. My problem is that I just don't have the time to rate my music with such detail, although I often wish I did.

In fact, I spend so little time with managing my music that I often can't be bothered to open my music player and then select what I want to hear. Instead, I have shuffle always on in the player, and a shortcut to the playlist in my Quick Start bar, so one click opens the player and starts playing random music from my favorite playlist.

Although I haven't used it as yet, I do leave "most played" tracking turned on, so that maybe sometime in the future I can see what I tend to prefer vs. what I tend to skip, and then tweak my playlist (or collection) accordingly.