You forgot that people still by CD's which will contain tracks you don't like as much.

I put in quite a bit of though about this myself.

General Thoughts

1) Music rating tends to skew to the extremes if you rate your whole library and whole library adjustments are required periodically to balance things out.

2) The distribution will be different if you buy or pirate music. If you buy you can now listen before you buy and just pay for the tracks you like, so chances are that every track should be rated at least 4. If you pirate, you may have a lot of tracks that you don't really like but you keep them because they are free anyway. Management will be totally different for these 2 scenarios.

3) The excellent track tag management capabilities means you can manage the ratings of your library as a whole entity. This usually means reducing the ratings of all the 5 star tracks you bought to preserve the value of that rating.

4) Rating isn't all that useful in a library where you actually bought your tracks and love them all. Once a artist achieves mastery and makes something compelling then it can only be a 5 and de-rating it to a 4 has no additional meaning just because at some point in time you may like another track slightly more.

5) In a bought library of exquisite music, the mood and tempo fields have much more meaning than rating. These fields allow you to find the tracks you are in the mood for to and make a coherent queue of tracks to sit down and listen too. No jarring fast tempo song when you want calm...

6) Rating is valuable when a group of people come together to share musical experience on the web and a 1+ is just about as descriptive as a 4 or 5 star rating. Either you recommend it or not ..... Google got that right

Lowlander wrote:I'd presume that most don't rate for a certain distribution, but instead to indicate how much they like the track.

That's what I do when rating tracks, and to indicate which tracks I want on my player (tracks rated three stars or above). The only limit I have is how many songs will fit on my player. As far as ratings go:

- Five stars: A favorite
- Four stars: A track I like and always want on my player
- Three stars: A track I want loaded on my player
- Two stars: A track that was on my player and I chose to remove
- One star: A track that was automatically loaded on my player during autosyncing and was later removed during autosyncing (unlike the others, MediaMonkey does this rating automatically)
- Zero stars: Not on my player
- Unrated: A new track

I'd presume that most don't rate for a certain distribution, but instead to indicate how much they like the track.

Thanks for the links, I had actually read them before posting however they didn't really address the input I was looking for. I am more curious as to the set up of the users, for example 10% for 5 stars, 25% 4 stars, etc... (hence the subject title - Rating distribution). Something similar to what Autorate does but on a 5 star rating system, from a user perspective. Nothing scientific.

Read:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... lit=rating
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... lit=rating

For me, I do not have limits. But I normally do not rate songs unless I really like them. So ratings for me are normally 3+ With music I just don't bother. For videos, i know you didn't ask , I do tend to rate them. But I have fewer of them and buy less films than cds/albums.

I'd like to have some input from user's that actually rate their songs, I always seem to end up with too much of 3 stars vs 4 stars or 2 vs 1....

I am not interested in knowing how you rate your music since a few threads already cover that, I am more curious in knowing what type of distribution guidelines/parameters you set yourself when rating your music. Do you set yourself a certain amount of songs or percentage per star? Do you apply a limit per CD? or as a whole for your library?

Thanks