How to rate songs?

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EinsteinX
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2010 2:29 pm

How to rate songs?

Post by EinsteinX »

Here is my current way of rating songs:

5 stars: maximum 15 songs
4 stars: maximum 135 songs
3 stars: maximum 300 songs
2 stars: maximum 1550 songs

And here's how I came up with this:
A while ago I noticed that my library's rating system did not make a lot of sense. In the past fifteen years that I build my modest collection of some seven thousand songs I had arbitrarily given stars to songs based on my feeling when a song played on MediaMonkey. I literally had hundreds of songs rated with stars and many dozens with five stars. Then I figured that it does not have any value to have so many songs rated that highly. Think about it: for a song to get five stars it must really be a special song, mustn't it?
So when I started thinking of how to make more sense of my song's ratings, I remembered that a bit over a decade ago when I used to travel for work (a lot) and consequently drove rental cars a lot, I always would burn some songs from my library onto audio CD's and take a folder with some CD's with me. This was when rentals that could play mp3's were really not that common yet. However, soon enough most rentals could indeed play mp's, so instead of burning audio CD's I burned data CD's and so I could either bring more music, or take less CD's. Remembering this then inspired me to set the limit for my 5 stars rating to one audio CD worth of music and that means a limit of 15 songs. Similarly, the mp3 CD is limited to 150 songs, but obviously if I want to take the best 150 songs from my collection, that also includes the 15 songs that had already been rated with five stars and so the four stars rating is limited to 135 songs. And on a side note, luckily MediaMonkey easily helped me with rating those songs with its autoplaylists of one audio CD worth of most listened songs and one mp3 CD worth.
A few years later most rental cars moved on to USB ports and I started carrying USB sticks. Please mind though that at that time they were actually still a bit expensive, so I started out with carrying a stick of just 1 or 2 GB. So the next level of rating songs that I chose was the capacity of a 2 GB USB stick, because it nearly tripples the limit from 150 songs to 450 songs. However, as with the four star and five star levels, already containing 150 songs, 300 songs may be rated with 3 stars.
Then my last chosen level of 2 stars is based on the present way we all take songs: the smartphone. 32 GB of memory nowadays is actually rather small, but I did base my rating on these 32 GB. Yet, a phone's operating system and a bunch of apps and photo's easily take up half of those 32 GB. So I set the limit to 16 GB of data, which according to a Google search I once did should hold about 2000 songs and so 1550 songs my get a 2 star rating.

So that is how I now set ratings of songs.

How do you rate your songs?

Regards, Eins
pushpull
Posts: 256
Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2006 9:01 pm
Location: Formerly WNY, now Portlandia
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Re: How to rate songs?

Post by pushpull »

I don't rate any. This seems a pointless task to me. I don't know how to even consider doing such a thing. Seems to arbitrary to me.
Luna Moon
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat May 26, 2018 8:58 am

Re: How to rate songs?

Post by Luna Moon »

Interesting.
What do you do when you get new music and it happens that there is a new 5 star song? Will you rate a former favorite down?
EinsteinX
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2010 2:29 pm

Re: How to rate songs?

Post by EinsteinX »

Luna Moon wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 1:05 pm Interesting.
What do you do when you get new music and it happens that there is a new 5 star song? Will you rate a former favorite down?
Exactly that; if a new song is released that I love so much that it deserves 5 stars then another song will get demoted. Actually I would like to have a script that would warn me if a certain group would have reached its limit, but I haven't taken the time to write something.

Eins
GeraldB
Posts: 167
Joined: Sun Aug 31, 2008 7:58 pm

Re: How to rate songs?

Post by GeraldB »

Interesting discussion. I don't use the rating system, but I do like to have convenient access to songs that strike me as so good that I expect to play them often. When I add songs to the database I put the juiciest ones on "hits" playlists -- Folk Hits, Country Hits, Great Female Voices, etc. -- for easy searching. Some of the not-hit 10,000 songs I might play rarely or possibly never, but they're available when I want to hear more of an artist's work or play songs with "moon" in the title or whatever.
Can't afford a signature.
TRegina
Posts: 10
Joined: Thu Oct 27, 2016 8:52 pm

Re: How to rate songs?

Post by TRegina »

Rating songs by different levels is too much time wasting tweaking for me. I try to keep it simple now.
I just want to enjoy the music and not worry about how many stars I should give each song.

I rate all my favorite songs 5 stars as they are playing on my iPod classic.
I have compiled a database of 1,200 favorite songs out of 22,000.
Whenever I want to hear just the "good" songs, I can easily create a playlist and play it.
I don't bother with the other stars.

I used to maintain two separate libraries for my two iPods to keep the play history stats separate.
However, I never looked at the stats and it was a pain to transfer my favorite song picks between the two iPods. Too much work for very little benefit. I now keep just one library.
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