I encounter lists of music tracks in several programs, where I can assign a rating to a track. I noticed that I use a different rating system depending on what list it is, not just how fine the steps are (usually one can only assign between 1 and 4 or 5 stars) but also, what kind of music list it is. My ratings just don't happen to be proportional between the lists.
The truth of it is, I just use a few check points to choose a rating, not some absolute numerical value, and I just don't use the same check list between the lists. Here is what works for me:
iRate radio
iRate radio is a system that chooses music for you, based on your rating of everything it gave you before, and the ratings of other people whose taste in music appears to have a correlation to yours.
Ratings go from 0 to 4 stars:
Winamp media library
This is my own personal permanent music collection, holding only the music I want to keep. Ratings go from 1 to 5 stars. As there's no reason to keep stuff I don't like, there wouldn't be much there to rate 1 or 2 stars as in iRate. That's a bit of a waste, so I don't do that: roughly, 1 star out of 5 here, agrees with a score between 6/10 and 7/10 on iRate.
My personal check points are as follows:
So, there isn't really a straightforward connection between these two checklists. But each on its own has its own well working guide points. So they both work for me, and do so consistently.
Re:regarding irate...
bart on 2005-02-02T23:46:58
Heh, I've done a very similar thing as you did in that column, but for a different purpose: I wanted to copy the stuff I like well enough to keep (3 and 4 stars in my score system) to my permanent mp3 disk, and rename the tracks, they usually have terrible names on the www, and iRate tends to use the same names for the local filenames; and properly fill in the ID3 tags too (often these are missing), all based on the data in this little XML database.Yes I hate it too how iRate insists on keeping everything it ever downloaded, even if you choose to get rid of it, because you heard it enough, without changing the actual rating. iRate's downloaded 1.68GB for 428 MP3 files, which is getting a bit hungry for my taste. My Windows c: disk is just a 6GB disk, and it's the only disk iRate can use on Windows to store its downloaded files, it is somewhere under "Profiles".
I also wish it would verify how long ago it's been since it last played a certain track, sometimes it plays the same track twice only minutes apart; and that it'd lower the playing frequency the more you've heard a track. If I really like a track that much, I won't wait for iRate to play it, to listen to it...
:) As for you using iTunes... I'd like to bypass the built in player too, as it tends to stutter a little on my humble old PC. Winamp never stutters, for example. The only thing keeping me back is the interface to the ratings system. I don't want to use Winamp's built in rating, as my rating score system is different there, like I described. I'd prefer a little GUI app that could A) figure out what track Winamp is currently playing (there are some perl modules to interface to Winamp, but my few tests haven't been that succesful), B) can update the XML "database", and C) request more URLs from the central server.
If only I could plug in a different audio player program instead of the built-in player, that would be easier still.
