Hi,

I wouldn't normally do such a fan boy impression but you guys seem to have been getting a lot stick for Amarok 2 which I think is rather unjustified. I'll admit that Amarok 2 still needs some work to bring it up to the standard 1.4 but over all I'm very impressed. I wasn't sure about the dynamic play list feature at first but now I've used it a bit I think it's fantastic. My one quibble with it is I can't quite figure out how it chooses music if multiple constraints are set up e.g. 75% of tracks from artist A and 75% from artist B gives what selection?

Anyway on to the feature requests, I don't think any of these would be particularly hard to implement but they would greatly increase my enjoyment of the software...

I'd really like a "Just Play Music" button. I generally want to just listen to some music from my collection while I work rather than pick particular tracks / artists. A single click to just load a random selection of tracks and play them would be great.

For the last 18 months or so I've had to work on a Windows machine and during that time I've rated most of my music in Widows Media Player. WMP has the option to insert the rating (out of 5) into the ID3 heading of an MP3 which I have been doing. It would be great if Amarok could read import this rating. Likewise it would good if Amarok could also write its rating for each track into the ID3 tag (or other meta data). It doesn't have to over write the WMP tag but a way of pushing changes back into the WMP tag would be good as then I could use the ratings everywhere.  As I move machines I don't mind re-importing my music but re-rating it all is a pain.

Lastly on the ratings front I'd like to be able to set the rating for a track in the play list. What would be really nice is if it was possible to select the information displayed with each track in the play list.

Keep up the great work.

Wobbly,

This gets tricky, because there isn't really any rating standard, or agreement.  The only standard for rating is the POPM frame, or Popularimeter.  This has an email address to identify a user (which I'm sure most people don't want to put in...but it could be faked), a rating, and a playcount.

The first problem is the email address -- unless a user wants their email addy in all their files (nope), then all we can really do is fake it with something like "amarokuser@somedomain".  Since these frames are identified by email address, this already means that you have problems interoperating with other player tags, unless there is some standard email address used (nope).  Plus, this means that everyone that plays that song with Amarok, even across Amarok instances, gets the same playcount information, unless we figure out some good UI place to allow a reset.

The next problem is the rating field, which goes from 0-255.  Amarok's rating system goes from 0 (unrated) to 10, allowing for up to five stars with half-stars in between.  So, how to map this onto the rating field?  0-10?  0-255?  Assuming you solve the email identifier problem, will all other players rate the same way?

Some players do away with the POPM field entirely and store their information in a text field (I think iTunes does this, not sure about WMP).  That's all well and good, except it's not documented, and subject to changing at any given time -- plus we don't really want Amarok writing tags to a file with iTunes or WMP identifiers.

So to sum it up -- cross-player ratings are pretty much a no-starter, although I'll continue to think about whether there might be good ways to do it.

I really want this feature (and checking out other posts I think quite a few people want it too) so hopefully we can find a way round these issues.

For me, at least, interoperability with other media players is more of a nice to have than an essential. The two essential features are importing ratings from other players POPM fields and having Amarok write it's own POPM field.

Having read a bit more about the POPM field and how other media players currently use it it would appear that no media player currently uses a real email address in the first field. The identifying strings currently used are "Banshee", "Windows Media Player 9 Series" and "no@email" (MediaMonkey) according to this bug report: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532650 . It would therefore seem that the privacy issue can easily be addressed by setting the identifier to a default, Amarok specific, string.

While the identifying strings for other media players aren't set in stone I can't honestly see them changing on a regular basis so an array of known strings would be a simple solution to finding the POPM tags of other players. Importing these ratings should done on a best effort basis. If the import works then the user gets all their ratings if it doesn't (because MS changes the POPM tag name for example) then the user is no wrose position than they are now.

The play count issue is easily addressed by not writing the play count information into the POPM tag. From what I've seen other media players don't appear to use the play count field.

As for how to store the rating, if Amarok is using it's own POPM field then it doesn't really matter how 0-->10 is mapped onto 0-->255 if Amarok is consistent across releases. I would suggest n * 25 is an option so 25 == one star, 50 == two starts etc. Anything 250 and over is 10 stars. In order to import information from other players POPM tags it will be necessary to determine how they are writing the rating value but it would be easy enough to have different reading (and writing) strategies for different players tags.

As a first pass I'd only import from POPM fields. If iTunes is writing out ratings in undocumented strings then fair enough that could start to get tricky to import from. I don't understand why you don't want Amarok to write tags in files which iTunes or WMP identifiers? Is this a DRM thing?

don't know where to post as this is technically a build request,
out of Amarok V2 and Amarok V1.4, Amarok V1.4 suits my taste perfectly and i was asking if that version would be ported to windows at anytime, as i'm moving back to windows XP (along side linux).

Logik wrote:don't know where to post as this is technically a build request,
out of Amarok V2 and Amarok V1.4, Amarok V1.4 suits my taste perfectly and i was asking if that version would be ported to windows at anytime, as i'm moving back to windows XP (along side linux).

No sorry, Amarok 1.4 cannot (technically) be ported to Windows at all. You could try to run it with something like "AndLinux" (google for it).