Reply To: How does Firefly handle ratings

#6056
rpedde
Participant

@GeraarGietaar wrote:

Hi,

I’ve been trying different players to organize my files.
MusicMatch Jukebox seemed to be the only one that actually wrote ratings to the tags. Except for the fact that it placed them in the comment field.
Now I’ve discovered MediaMonkey. This one places the rating in the appropriate field and uses a scale from 0 – 255 as defined by te ID3 v2.3.
It now seems that Firefly converts these to a 0 – 100 scale but rounds evreything to 20 – 40 – 60 – 80 – 50. This corresponds with 1-2-3-4-5 star ratings. MM however uses half stars.
Is there any way to implement the correct scale (0 – 255) or at least be able to use the correct scale without converting them.
This way when creating smart playlist, you’d only have to use the correct value instead of figuring out how teh vealus are converted.

GeraarGietaar

Every single player uses different scales and values. WMA is different from AAC is different from MP3. So they all have to be converted to *some* standard.

You could argue everything should be promoted to 0-255, but remember that this started as a server for iTunes, so it made sense to convert everything to the standard that apple uses. It’s just easier that way, when one is going to ultimately serve it to iTunes which wants a value from 0-100 anyway. So that’s what I picked.

I suppose I could just scale the value rather than locking it into a star value, but I honestly don’t see the difference between “rating > 80” and “rating > 248”. In my book, you could probably squish everything down to a 0-4 rating anyway, or maybe at best a 0-9 rating. For me, I don’t think I could express an interest in a song that was “252 strong” rather than “251 strong”.

If you wanted to argue for a different scale (besides 0-100), I’d encourage you to modify the source to do that. 🙂

If you want scaling from the 0-255 to the 0-100 scale, I’d be willing to do that, provided it doesn’t make iTunes choke. I don’t know how it will react to a 37 or something. Guess we can see.