How does Firefly handle ratings

[GeraarGietaar]

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

[grommet]

Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 10/11 can also write ratings to tags, but it’s “off” by default. Most applications just maintain ratings in their own database, like iTunes.

Ron will need to comment about the conversion. iTunes’ UI only lets you set “0,1,2,3,4,5 stars” (even though the UI can display half stars)… internally I think it’s 0-100, and the reason Firefly uses that scale. WMP also sticks to the full 0-5 star model in the UI.

Remember, there is no single “correct scale”… personally, I think 255 values is a bit overkill. 😀

[rpedde]

@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.

[GeraarGietaar]

I wasn’t aware of the fact that Firefly was build to serve iTunes.
So it makes sense how you implemented it of course.
I wouldn’t go for a 0 – 255 rating as well for the same reasen you mentioned. I guess a 0 – 10 should be sufficient and this would enable the use of half-stars. I would appreciate it if you could look into this since I (and growing number of people) find that MediaMonkey is a player well worth taking a look at.
I’m shure it must appeal to people involved in scripts and customizing progams such as yourself.
Anyway, thanks for the explanation.
By the way, since iTunes keeps its ratings in an internal database rather than writing to the tags, how could using another scale in Firefly interfere with this since you convert it anyway.
I’m quite interested in how this works.

[grommet]

Firefly also serves iTunes (DAAP) clients… so, if Ron did store it differently… he’d need to convert it back when communicating to iTunes or iTunes compatible clients.

[rpedde]

@GeraarGietaar wrote:

By the way, since iTunes keeps its ratings in an internal database rather than writing to the tags, how could using another scale in Firefly interfere with this since you convert it anyway.

What grommet said. I keep everything in my own database, and it makes sense to store the values in the database in the same format that I’m going to be pushing them to iTunes. That way I don’t have to convert them at the time the client requests data, I can just pump the data out straight from the database.

I added a ticket to scale the conversion rather than locking it to 20/40/60/etc, though, so I’ll have that implemented reasonably soon.

— Ron

[paulwa]

I’m trying to replicate my iTunes playlists using the Firelfly smart playlist wizard. Having read many of the forum posts on playlists, I’m still having trouble understanding how to create a Firefly playlist based on the iTunes star ratings, e.g. Echo & the Bunnymen tracks rated > ***

Do I need to take an intermediate step, to create a value in the “comment” field in iTunes, which represents the star rating? I see from your posts that this is normally done from in steps of 20 points from a value of 0 to 100.

Or, is Firefly able to pick up the star rating automatcially if I simply tell the wizard that, for example, rating > 60? I have tried this option and the tracks don’t appear in the smart playlist folder when viewed on my Soundbridge or in iTunes.

I have my library on a NAS drive, in case that throws any further spanners into the works, however I am able to see the iTunes playlists passed through from the XML file.

Thanks, Paul.

[paulwa]

My apologies, Firefly did pick up the iTunes ratings after a while. I think it was a rescan issue.

[Iris]

@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

Could someone confirm the rating scale. Is it rounded as this posts mentions thus the only valid values are 20,40,60,80 at playlind 100 or 1 to 20, 21 to 40 and so on. If I want to create a playlist of 3 star rated songs should I just use the value of 60 or 41 to 60?

Iris

[rpedde]

@Iris wrote:

@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

Could someone confirm the rating scale. Is it rounded as this posts mentions thus the only valid values are 20,40,60,80 at playlind 100 or 1 to 20, 21 to 40 and so on. If I want to create a playlist of 3 star rated songs should I just use the value of 60 or 41 to 60?

Iris

If they were tagged in iTunes, they are 20/40/60/80/100. Well, there are hacks for half-star, but they aren’t in the user-interface and require scripts.

In fact, right now, *anything* is still 20/40/60/80/100. I would use “rating >= 60” for 3 start or above.

or “rating >= 60 and rating < 80" for *just* 3 star songs. — Ron

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