I\'ve seen many posts on this board requesting a new or modified method of scoring tracks and I really do think this feature should be addressed. Although it is very nice that the songs are currently automatically rated (makes it convenient to deal with large collections), this system has several very serious drawbacks.

First, skipping or stopping a song does not imply that the song is disliked. For me, it implies this maybe half the time. I frequently try to find a particular track and end up skipping through a lot of tracks before finding it. Consequently, all of these tracks end up having lower ratings.

Another problem is that highly rated songs stay at the top. To solve this problem \"score decay\" has been proposed, which I think is a very intelligent solution to this problem.

I would like to propose a solution to all of these problems. Right now, play count is stored and used to calculate the score. Instead, I think these two statistics should be separated. Play Count should keep track of how many times the track has been listened to all the way through. This allows a method of finding the most played tracks fast, which serves the same purpose as finding tracks with the highest score since most often the tracks with the highest score have never been skipped anyways.

In addition to play count, a five-star scoring system should be implemented that allows the user to manually rate tracks. This score should not be changed by any automated means and allows the user to quickly and permanently separate the liked and disliked tracks.

To solve the score decay problem, Play Count can be adjusted to reflect time, for example only count the number of times a song was played in the last month, 6 months, etc. Alternatively, Play Count can be treated just as Score would be treated and the decay can be handled the same. The only change being instead of Score being maxed at 100, Play Count will be maxed at the most played track.

I hope I have made myself clear when making these suggestions and I would like the developers to seriously consider making some changes to the current Scoring method, most importantly the need for manual scoring that does not change (I know a user can manually score a song, but the score drops the next time the song is skipped so this is not a solution at all).

On a different note, amaroK is by far the best media player I have ever used, and I am very confident it will stay that way for a long time. Thank you for the great work!