One of the things that I love/hate about media player software is rating media. It’s great that I have a quick way to get to the songs I really like. The two that I have used so far (iTunes and Zune) both allow you to rank songs on a scale from 0-5 stars. So 5 stars = excellent, 1 star = crap, and 0 stars = not rated. The problem is that you can’t rank something 4.5 stars for a song that’s really good but not excellent.
Another thing that iTunes does is that it keep tracks of the number of times a song has been played and when. I use this feature to have a smart playlist of podcasts that I haven’t heard yet. If you don’t finish the song completely it doesn’t increment the play count.
I think that a better way to rank songs would be to have the ratio of times the song was complete compared to the number of times the song was started. So if I never listen to a song fully it would have a ranking of 0 which would imply that I hate it and songs that I listen to all the time would have a ranking of 100. If the song hasn’t been finished for a long time the rating can slowly decrement to half it’s ranking after a year or so (this could easily be modified to a user’s preferences). It seems to me that this would be really easy to implement and really would be a better way to rank media.
2 users commented in " A Better Way to Rank Media "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackCould something like this be leveraged with smart playlists already? I think possibly.
One thing to consider: I skip a fair number of songs because there’s silence at the end (for hidden tracks) — that doesn’t mean I dislike the song!
That’s a good point. Maybe instead of having the play count be an integer value it could be a floating point value and when a song is skipped it adds {length into song}/{length of song} to the value. I think I skip most songs I dislike after the first couple seconds.
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