Hi,

at the moment, the scoring system is quite simple and I am not satisfied with it.
I would like to implement a more intelligent scoring system. But only if poeple would like to have a new one and if someone would help me initally to find the entry point in the amarok code to do it.
Maybe it is also possible to produce modular code so that someone could choose his scoring algorithms.

So here is my suggestion for the new scoring mechanisms, which I would like to be discussed here:

[ul]
[*]The basics stay the same. The following points should complement the actual algorithm.
[*]When amaroK is closed, the actual song will not be rated, because closing amaroK does not say if I like or dislike this song.
[*]Scoring should be time-variant:
When a song is played multiple times within a short duration (maybe 2 hourse, maybe a day) it gets a increased scoring.
On the other hand, the score of a track which was not played for a long time should decrease by time with a lower bound of 50 (=neutral). Why should a song which I have not heard for half a year have a score of 100%?
[/ul]

I think these rules can prevent a two class scoring system (>90% and

I like the idea of some kind of score decay myself, this way songs I listen to a lot in a short period of time will not forever stay at the top of my list if I don\'t listen to them again for a long time.

I\'ll tell you my point of view

Most of the time, i use the random mode to listen to my music because. I think this is getting more and more popular (see the popular party mode for example). So there\'s no point in a scoring algorithm, because each song is approximately listened the same amount of time.

I think that manual scoring would be best, that\'s why we get a lot of people asking how to manually edit the score.

The best may be to combine the two solutions, by allowind the user to increase/decrease the score by clicking on the left/right border of the stars.

Just my 2 cents

No, its quite the opposite. Now with random mode, things get scored more accurately for me, since I skip over songs I don\'t like.

So what\'s the point to have a song in your collection if you always skip it when it comes to play ? There are songs that i like, and others that i love, and i want to listen to them equally, and don\'t skip it.

The annoying thing is that there\'s no easy and direct way to increase a song\'s score other than skipping the songs you may like less. Actually for me it\'s easier to tell which songs i prefer, so changing their scores is more easy than lowering all the others.

I hope you understand what i mean (quite messy when i re-read it )

Well, for instance, I have some Britney Spears and some 80s music. I don\'t like either, but if DJ for a dance, Spears is actually quite good. And some songs of some albums I don\'t like, but I\'m not about to go trim all my albums. Thats why we have scores.

Maybe some of the devs (or someone else ) can give me some hints. I want to play around with scoring and now I have the problem to find the places in the code where the score is re-calculated.
Can you point me to these places (or the single place), this would be really nice.

Thanks.

Well, I\'m not sure you thought of this, but through the magic of dcop, you can probably create a custom scoring system without modifying amarok at all.

That\'s true, this would enable a very flexible way to implement your own scoring algorithm. But I am not sure that the current DCOP calls are usable this way. There are several problems (including how to tell a script about song changes and so on) making a scripted scoring system hard to implement.
So I still believe changing a few lines in the code will do a better job and are easier to implement.

Correct me if I am wrong.

zekant wrote:

I think that manual scoring would be best, that\'s why we get a lot of people asking how to manually edit the score.

I came to the amarok site for just this reason. I\'ve been using amarok for the last few weeks after upgrading to KDE 3.4. Over-all, it is nice - I like the album covers and lyrics links in particular.

But the automated scoring just gets in the way of the scoring system. What I want to do is tell amarok which songs I like, but instead of clicking \'up\', or \'I like it\', what I end up having to do is play games with the automation system to get it to do what I want.

In general, there should always be a way to manually override any computer-generated data.. Taylor the system to the user, don\'t make the user change their behavior to match the system.

I agree with Vigor, so many people have asked for a way to manually rate their songs and based on how many other players have this capability I think it is long overdue in amaroK. The classic response to this is something like \"you can change the score by right clicking the score and choosing edit\" but not only is this an inconvenient way of manually rating more than a few tracks, it does nothing in the long run since amaroK still changes the value you entered!

The idea of an automatic scoring system is great, but ultimately the current method amounts to little more than something a play counter could accomplish (assuming amaroK\'s behavior with the play counter changes to increase after the song is finished). The only real benifit of the current system is that skipping songs decreases the rating, however, it has also been argued (and I agree with the argument) that skipping a song does not imply the song is disliked such as when a user is browsing his or her collection searching for a song.

As Vigor said, \"don\'t make the user change their behavior to match the system.\" Many times I have wanted to skip past a song I really like if I suddenly get the urge to listen to something else, but I didn\'t because I didn\'t want to have to manually change the score back to where it was. Similarly, when looking for a song, I will move the track position slider to the end of the song so the score increases instead. Ultimately, the automatic scoring system is a great idea but very very inconvenient in practice due to the many assumptions it must make that are often incorrect.

I say it\'s time for the devs to accept that the scoring system is fundementally flawed and implement a manual rating system like iTunes\' five-star system.

Well, the problem with your argument is that you make the assumption that it (the scoring system) is fundamentally flawed because a few very vocal people come and complain about it. Amazingly, there is also a very large group of people that like the current feature because the idea is that amaroK tells you what you really do like, as opposed to what you think you like. That\'s the feature. I know in my case, it has changed the way I spend my money on music and I am much more satisfied with the things I buy.

If you skip a song to get to another song, that means that you like the second song better. So amaroK scores the tracks based on what you really like and really listen to, and not what you think you like. That was the point of the whole feature, to make it different than every other media player that lets you fool yourself.

Now, with that being said, there are plans to allow the user to disable automatic scoring in the 1.3 version currently being developed. This will allow all manner of custom scoring scripts to be written so that anybody that wants a particular way of doing it can do it any way they want. Also, since it will be able to be disabled, the score won\'t change until you cahnge it yourself.

Unfortunately, this may take awhile because the dev that maintains this feature will be unavailable for an indeterminate amount of time for personal reasons. But, my point is he does listen, just be patient.

I like the automated scoring, because I change my opinion if a song is great or not (I only have songs I like in my collection) over time. But this is not covered by the recent scoring algorithms.

Some would like a manual score entry. So fine, let\'s make scoring more flexible, chooseable, modular. That\'s why I want to try to change it and play around, maybe contributing a modular scoring system so that you can choose how your songs should be rated. But I still need this little help to find the important code parts (I do not have the time right now to search or read the whole code).

So for you there would be just a switch to turn of automatic scoring at all.

Hi,

I must agree 100% with syme236. For me the automated rating is a pain in the ****. Also because Amarok has problems detecting the correct length of some of my songs, so the rating is never right on these songs. I know this is more a bug of amarok than inconvenience of the rating system. Still it is one more reason why I want a manuel iTunes/Winamp like rating system.

I am convinced there are people out there who love the automated rating. Thats why it should still exist in future versions of amarok. But I hope there will be a little bit more focus in development on the manual rating. Only disableing the automated rating is not an optimal solution. I would like to see an extra column for the manal ratings - which should not be in percentage. Nobody likes a song 87%... a five or six point/star should do the job. This way both rating systems can coexist nicely together, benefitting from eachothers advantages.

Another column for the playcount would be very nice to, but this is off Topic (auto vs. manual)

Playcount column is in current svn, check it out