one-half star ratings?

[RichardP]

I just installed Mezzmo today and am trying it out. I went ahead and purchased Pro, but that's an aside.

I had Mezzmo scan just one of my folders to test it out. That brought in around 700 mp3 files. Many of those files have "star" ratings in their tags from the media player I usually use (MediaMonkey). Media Monkey supports 1/2 star ratings, but apparently Mezzmo doesn't? I'm looking at a track that has a 3 1/2 star rating in MediaMonkey, but Mezzmo imported it with a 4 star rating.

Btw, I tried playing the same track in Windows Media Player, which I never use. It showed up there with 4 stars, also.

Any possibility of supporting 1/2 star increments in the star ratings in the future? Thanks.

[Peter]

Hi,
Mezzmo converts the star rating from being out of 10 (which supports 1/2 ratings) to out of 5 which does not. Possibly we could support 1/2 ratings in the future, is there any special reason you require 1/2 ratings?

[RichardP]

Hi Peter. "Special reason?" It depends on what you consider "special". Media Monkey offers 1/2-star rating increments, so I use them. My own rating system is 0, 0.5, 1 = various degrees of horrible. 1.5 = bad. 2=unimpressive, I don't care if I hear it again. 2.5=average, OK. 3=good. 3.5=superior. 4=exceptional 4.5=best of the best 5=best of the best + the song has special meaning to me. I tend to rate on the bell curve, so there are a lot of 2.5's and 3's. Fewer 3.5's, even fewer 4's, and so on. I don't have as many lower rated songs (after all, I don't seek out music I don't like to have in my collection), but once something gets in there that I don't like, I usually leave it in there with a low rating. It reminds me not to add anything else by that artist. If I just deleted the "bad" tracks, I know I would likely download some of them again simply because I forgot I didn't like them. More importantly, I might waste my time retagging these files a second time, and I don't want to do that.

By the way, Yahoo Music ages ago offered a 100-point rating system which I used. Some of us are OCD. The more granularity, the better. But even I admit, 100 points was excessive. But 10 steps (actually, 11: 0, 0.5, 1, ... , 4.5, 5) is useful. If you only have a few thousand tunes, whole-number ratings are probably OK. For large libraries (say, 50,000 or more) that have lots of tracks rated, the 1/2-point increments add value, in my opinion, for those who really try to be thorough on ratings.

One other point, and I think this is generally applicable. On one day, you might like a song a lot. On another day, you might like it a little less, depending on your mood or whatever. I know that my ratings might fluctuate a little day to day. My goal is to assign a rating whereby, if I rated the same song again on a different day, my new rating would be within 1/2 star of the first rating. That is my measure of consistency.

Sometimes a song is on the cusp between two different ratings. If you only have whole-number ratings to work with, there is a wider range of how much you actually like a song within each rating. IMO, that makes the ratings less usable. In the 3-star category, for example, there will be songs that barely escaped a 2-star rating, and some that almost got a 4-star rating. That's too wide of a variation within each rating value.

[Paul]

Thanks for your thoughts. As mentioned by Peter, we'll add this to our development list and discuss it further here for possible inclusion into a future version of Mezzmo.