Poweramp finally needs a half-star rating system

[PatoNani]

I already appreciated it that Poweramp gave users more options to rate the songs: full stars and thumbs up/down. For someone like me who's using Musicbee for my PC I absolutely LOVE the half-star rating system. It's still one of my favorite features for any music player. I searched for android music players who also supports the half-star rating system and not only full-star rating system but only PlayerPro and GoneMad doing this. Both apps still lack in different areas and that's why I currently would still choose Poweramp over PlayerPro and GoneMad. 

I'm begging you to make the half-star rating system happend for the next update. That's all I want. I'm very detailed in tagging my music and a precise rating is a part of this in my opinion. There're so many songs I would rate with 4,5 stars or 3,5 stars but I can't. It's basically integral for many of the best websites and apps where you can rate music: Musicbee, Media Monkey, Rateyourmusic, iTunes, Amazon, Allmusic or basically every music magazine who rates albums and songs from a scale 1-10. 

[Cire254]

Yeah, I'm also a musicbee user and unfortunately Poweramp does not store its ratings on ID3 tags. So Im requesting for this feature.

[andrewilley]

Half-star ratings do sound like a simple enough idea to implement - but then I'm not the programmer, so what do I know?

Of course if they were to be implemented, someone would soon come along and say ten steps is simply not enough and please can we have a 1-100 percentage system.  At least 1-5 stars is a pretty commonly used rating system, and it's far better than the basic thumbs up/down option that we had when PA v3 was first launched.

As for writing ratings back to file tags on-the-fly (along with play count, album art, etc) Max has always resisted this idea for a number of reasons, including not all file formats support ratings, the possibility of corrupting poorly built files, and playback glitching during the write process.

Personally I think the world is probably now ready for these issues to be overcome. The most common MP3/ID3, FLAC/Vorbis and M4A tags support ratings, and if a particular format does not then a toast message could inform the user that their change was not saved. The exiting Tag Editing feature seems to work pretty well without corrupting poorly designed files anyway, so probably that one is worth the risk (and sensible people keep backup copies anyway). And playback glitching is less of an issue with faster and faster devices and better storage speeds. There could be a prompt warning about possible issues when the user turns this feature on, and the setting could even feature a three-way option such as "Write Ratings to Files Immediately" | "Prompt Each Time" | "Never Write Ratings".

Andre

[Joshua Watson]

The inability to display and assign half star ratings is my biggest issue with PA right now. The ID3 tag standard fpr POPM stores rating data as a byte value from 1-255, so when the rating is scanned in there is already some simple conversion going on to get to a star rating value. I imagine that the hardest part of coding that would be adding in half-star UI functions and some error handling for when things get messy (ie, default to POMP rating value=0 if something goes wrong).

I have a bunch of songs with half-star ratings (they mean different things in different genres for me), and even with some extra love from theflyingdutchman with music playlist manager, I can't really get a true sync of my music library to android because ratings are rounded to the nearest value. 

[andrewilley]

As I said before, I can't see this being technically too hard to implement as the data is already stored in a one-byte number. But that's up to Max to prioritise alongside everything else he's doing.

Of course, if Max does add it someone is sure to come along and ask for an infinitely variable slider system. 

Andre

[flyingdutchman]

@andrewilley it would also require a small change to the data type  in the table as it is defined as Integer (no decimal places)

[andrewilley]

@flyingdutchman Ah right, and that's for Poweramp's internal values of 0-5 I assume? It's only external POPM/etc which uses the 0-255 scheme, which of course Poweramp neither reads nor writes.

Andre 

[flyingdutchman]

@andrewilley at the moment my app music playlist manager scales the popm value up when writing to popm and of course down when writing to the database

[Joshua Watson]

To summarize in one place, since the rating in PA is stored as an integer (assuming 0-5 rather than 0-255), and id3 and other tag rating info seems to be stored as a 0-255 byte, any half star ratings will be lost upon rating conversion to PA via Music Playlist Manager app. In essence, this means that while synchronizing ratings to PA is safe (if lossy), synchronizing ratings back out will result in a permanent loss of all half star rating data. 

We are assuming the rating integer in PA is stored as a value from 0-5, but it's possible that the rating could actually 0-255 and math converts the value to a 0-5 at the UI stage. This would at least preserve ratings when exporting PA formatted ratings. And while we are at it... it would be great to include functionality for half star ratings in PA too!

@flyingdutchman I'm using tasker intents with the New Music Playlist app to get ratings in PA format in an automated way (COOL!). Really great work on that by the way.

Also, @andrewilley, I'm impressed by how friendly and helpful you are in these forums -- I wish my forums had people like you! Any chance you want to join a math teacher forum? =D

[andrewilley]

First, thanks for the thanks. I try to help - not always successfully of course, but that's the nature of the task sometimes.

Given that PA has never read or written any external ratings information from files, and has only ever offered 0-5 stars (or Thumbs Down/Up, which equate to 1-star and 5-star) I can't see why Max would have specially written his code to convert the app's internal 0-5 range into a 0-255 scale for the internal database, what would have been the point? Which would make the process of adding half-stars a bit more complex than I first thought.

Andre

[flyingdutchman]

@Joshua Watson @andrewilley , a few points, if a half star rating was implemented i would of course also amend the code in mpm.

Secondly. You say you use tasker to extract ratings, it would be useful if you could post the tasker configuration , others may find this useful.

[Joshua Watson]

@flyingdutchman Here is a TaskerNet profile users can import directly into Tasker with the following functionality (assuming the directories is Music Playlist Manager are set correctly):

-Automatically runs the popm2pa intent at 2:30 AM every day.

-Intent for pa2popm is ready to use, but is not set to run automatically (since this presently results in data loss for half-star ratings)