13

With this option it should be possible to rate albums in amarok the same way you can rate individual songs. I find that some albums have songs of about the same quality and it would be great if you could rate this album as a whole instead of every song.
Some people (like me) listen mostly to albums instead of individual songs, so this would be a great feature.

Use cases:

• You can have an album browser applet with some statistics about the albums, namely ratings of the albums. Other statistics like number of plays would be welcome too. (This would provide a good way of browsing your music, if it has good searching/sorting abilities)
• Dynamic playlist could have an option to make a playlist of albums based on rating

Remark:
If you have to create a ranking for albums, where do you list albums without a rating? Do you place them at the end or do you take the average of the song ratings? Do you also count things like number of times played.

I love Amarok to death, but as a whole I've found the rating system kinda lacking. Playing around with different versions all the time (distro junkie, haha) I never keep my collection for very long, so I've ended up not using it. I really wish that ratings were kept separate from the collection, even though I realize that that defeats the whole point of having a single collection file. :P

But I wish there was an option to offload the tagging to (or synchronize with) 3rd-party services like Nepomuk so that KDEs music player might actually be integrated with KDE. That way, assuming your albums are arranged each in their own folder (hopefully!), you could just use the Nepomuk rating for that folder to represent the albums rating (a little sketchy, I know). But this would also open the doors to support with other software, I'd love to sync ratings with Ampache so my internet music server could be as useful as Amarok is, or Rockbox so that I might bother to even use it's rating features knowing the data will be useful. Hell, it might even one day lead to giving Libre.fm a very awesome feature that would make it more than just a clone of Last.fm, with it's boolean 'love it/hate it' rating system.

I've typed all this under the assumption that all the necessary API to make this happen isn't exposed through the Amarok scripting feature, and that all it takes is for someone to write a "Ratings Import/Export and Synchronization" script and post it on kde-apps.org. If that is the case, than that'd be awesome, and I might even try it myself.

This is kinda a threadjack from the OP's original request, so I'll echo his sentiments as well: I too listen mostly to full albums, and would love a way to represent whole albums in a single rating, even if it was just derived from the individual scores of songs in the album. It'd also be nice for this rating to visible running along the bottom of every (only some?) display of that albums cover art throughout Amarok.

edit: And IIRC Amarok has a "score" based on how many times a track was played, and a user defined rating system in addition. I don't remember at all what 'score' was for, though.

Why tags and ratings cant be stored in id3?

Collection would just read the data in id3, but is you loose a collection file or move files to other PC, ratings and tagging wont be lost. Media Monkey, as far as i remember, stores rating data in music files itself. Why amarok cant join this 'standart'?

I think because it destroys the "portability" of the files, in that now they are all modified with a single user's arbitrary (to everyone else) rating. If the files were on, say, a shared computer or network share where they could be indexed by more than one media player than conflicts could come up between different users trying to change their tags.

Good point, but...

Despite that file rating could be just a primary source. Amarok could have an options
* Always use id3 an collection ratings and sync them
* Use iod3 ratings only if collection rating is not present
* Never use id3 ratings

Set a shared resource as setting 2 or 3, or deny writing permissions for users