Album 5 star rating support / Half star support

[Theboombringer1]

The title is pretty self explanatory. I'd like to rate my albums, rather than the individual songs themselves. Coming from a Rateyourmusic background, it just seems more natural to me. While I'm here, half star support would be nice for that perfect integration. This is a really amazing app, the best music player on android probably!

[6b6561]

I have a long time had hard to understand why you would need to rate albums and seen this as some nice to have feature which wouldn't be used. I have started to understand this over time as my library has grown, I have now 700 albums in my library and I'm starting to loose track over the good ones, and I must say that this is something that I would low to have, the luxury to sort albums by rating and hit play.

[andrewilley]

The problem is that all of the song attributes which PA uses are just that, song attributes. It doesn't have any real concept of objects such as Albums, Artists, Genres, Years, etc - they are merely groups of items that happen to have similar tags and which are shown in a list layout. Admittedly the Rating concept in this case is not actually based on the file-embedded Popularimeter (POPM) tag, but I guess long-term that's where it ought to come from - and that refers specifically to a song, not to any other grouping element.

Reading and writing POPM tags has been a matter of some discussion for quite a few years now, but that would still only be a song-based solution (maybe album lists could show an average rating based on all the associated songs?):

Andre

[6b6561]

Let's not split hairs, as such you are right, a album is just a group of items that shares a common sets of tags but for the majority of users, these are albums. I would guess that there is already a table in the database for these pseudo albums as you are able to sort them by date added so adding a column in the DB for holding a rating is not a big thing.

What requires a lot of work are the changes in the GUI, and enabling album ratings would probably open up another can of worms what comes to requests in this area. A simple first implementation could be as "easy" as:

• Add a column to the DB for the album rating.
• Allow user to rate album by long pressing the rating icon on the album cover.
  • Short press - rate track.
  • Long press - rate album.
• Add rating as sort option to the album categories in the library.

And after this see what comes out of the famous can.

So I see "album" ratings as a realistic and feasible request that I second.

[6b6561]

Bump...

[flyingdutchman]

On 1/26/2021 at 7:09 AM, 6b6561 said:

Let's not split hairs, as such you are right, a album is just a group of items that shares a common sets of tags but for the majority of users, these are albums. I would guess that there is already a table in the database for these pseudo albums as you are able to sort them by date added so adding a column in the DB for holding a rating is not a big thing.

What requires a lot of work are the changes in the GUI, and enabling album ratings would probably open up another can of worms what comes to requests in this area. A simple first implementation could be as "easy" as:

• Add a column to the DB for the album rating.
• Allow user to rate album by long pressing the rating icon on the album cover.
  • Short press - rate track.
  • Long press - rate album.
• Add rating as sort option to the album categories in the library.

And after this see what comes out of the famous can.

So I see "album" ratings as a realistic and feasible request that I second.

Although more than a year old, a column for rating has always existed,

the only issue is that when the database is first populated, the ratings are not part of that process. Whilst there has been a lot of discussion on this, I have developed this functionality quite a while ago in my app Music Playlist Manager. The routine reads the POPM (aka Popularimeter) tag, down/upscales the value to a value in the range 1-5 and updates the rating in the Poweramp database

 

 

[MotleyG]

On 1/26/2021 at 2:09 AM, 6b6561 said:

Let's not split hairs, as such you are right, a album is just a group of items that shares a common sets of tags but for the majority of users, these are albums.

This is partly correct, users often perceive a collection of songs as part of an album. But reality is each file is distinct. So an “Album” rating would essentially be a shared asset for all tracks on that album. Does that mean every time you make a single Album rating, all 10 or so files would each need to update? Seems like a lot of file management to me.
 

On the other hand, maybe this could be managed only in Poweramp’s database. If so, what does that need to add to be effective? How does this get managed differently from track ratings? And of course as soon as this is done, the next question will be how to store these ratings permanently in the file, like is already a sore point for many PA users.

I see the value in having an Album rating. I just don’t know how to add it within Poweramp without a better standard in place to follow.

[flyingdutchman]

@MotleyG oops, i missed the album rating bit. I guess it has to be the average of the ratings recorded for those album tracks. I already provide an average rating for a playlist

[MotleyG]

27 minutes ago, flyingdutchman said:

@MotleyG oops, i missed the album rating bit. I guess it has to be the average of the ratings recorded for those album tracks. I already provide an average rating for a playlist

If you make an album rating as an average, does that then override any existing individual track ratings? I always understood that an Album rating would be the calculated average of the actual track ratings, not one that could just be applied at will. But perhaps I misunderstood this.

[flyingdutchman]

@MotleyG yes it would be a calculated value int(sum of ratings/no tracks)

I will endeavour to add this to the library album view

[andrewilley]

As has been said, in audio file terms the concept of an 'Album' is not actually a real entity - it is merely a notional grouping made up of a number of individual song files that have the same text contained in their embedded 'Album' and 'Album Artist' tags.

The POPM rating tag applies to the individual song file only, not to any derived grouping that the song might belong to. Thus an 'Album' can't really have its own rating - any more than you can give a rating to other groups based on tags such as Genre, Year, Composer or Track Number.

However I do agree half-star ratings would be nice - as long as Max doesn't mind updating the music database to allow for the extra range. I'm not sure whether internally making it a floating point number, or changing the range to 0-10, would cause the least problems to other apps using the same data.

Andre

[6b6561]

Good discussion! Quite a can of worms after all.

Anything can be rated, maybe the music of -69 is better that the music of -79... someone might want to rate album covers... playlists... artists... so it all boils down to what the developer want to take into the project and that's probably what's wanted or benefits most of the users.

As of today the track ratings are kept internal in Poweramps internal DB, you can export/import Poweramp ratings through playlists, or import POPM values through @flyingdutchman Playlist Manager.

So as long as track ratings are Poweramp internal, then it might make sense to have a" album" rating independent of the track ratings, maybe even have an album genre which wouldn't care about the individual tracks.

Two ways either the album would have it's own rating, or a rating based on the tracks.

Poweramp is like iTunes when it comes to ratings, it's locked down and internal... and I guess it will be this way until Poweramp starts to update data in the files... or read POPM as a starter.

POPM by the way is a integer between 0-255.

But most of this discussion is arbitrary until this is taken onto the famous drawing board.

 

[flyingdutchman]

@6b6561 today (24/4/22) i released a new version of mpm which shows the album rating. The principle can of course be applied to other categories such as artists, genres etc. My next release will allow you to rate an album in one go ( effectively rating its tracks with the same value)

By the way, ratings was always a part of the Poweramp database, it is just a matter of applying them in different contexts which i am in the process of developing. Any input from forum members will be appreciated

[Mark89]

@flyingdutchman I tried yours "The Other Playlist Manager" and I'm stuck at permission screen.

I created "playlist_folder", grant permission for sd card but after that all I got is blank screen.

I'm using Android 7.1

[flyingdutchman]

@Mark89 for app support, please contact me by email.