I like that - CB is subjective, MB is objective.
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Donāt use them and even hide them with the script.
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Never used ratings, actually donāt use ratings and never will use ratings.
The reason is simple: IMHO ratings are highly subjective. They match only the āmoodā from the one who give this rating at one specific point in time. I canāt imagine that a third-party rating will ever match my own current rating.
Therefore I will not miss them if they went away.
Unlike Genres, which I really like here at MB. Even if they are not precise science, I think anyone can distinguish a Rap song from a classical piano piece. For me it doesnāt matter if a song is āhouseā or ādeep houseā, but Iām happy to see that it is not a āspeed metalā song.
(I donāt want to offend anyone with this examples.)
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Iāve never used MBās ratings.
I use my own locally-stored ratings to decide what music to listen to, and other peopleās opinions arenāt useful to me there. 
Iād rather just use my own thing instead of depending on an external service.
When Iām considering buying music from an artist that Iām not familiar with, I usually decide which albums to check out by looking at sites with reviews by professional critics (e.g. AllMusic, Pitchfork, Metacritic) or by doing searches on Reddit or Google. I hadnāt thought of looking at the average ratings on MB, but now that Iām glancing at several artists I see that most of their release groups are scored 4 or higher, which doesnāt seem useful (maybe only diehard fans are adding ratings?). Many release groups only have a single rating (if any), too.
Iād probably only find MBās ratings useful if there were enough of them to form some sort of general consensus of the listening public rather than just being a few strangersā opinions. The ratings clutter the UI a bit, so Iād welcome an option to hide them or make them less prominent. LB or CB also seem like a better fit to me (with the disclaimer that I donāt currently use either of them), since I think of MB as containing factual data rather than peopleās opinions.
Iām not using ratings at all, so I wouldnāt mind if they were removed.
I donāt really see the point of ratings in MusicBrainz. IMHO ratings would make much more sense in ListenBrainz, if recommendations algorithm was taking them into account.
Having said that, I donāt mind the ratings in MB. They donāt bother me, and are easy to ignore.
No opinion about moving recommendations from MB to CB. Iām not using the latter.
I am not using ratings in MusicBrainz at all. I have never used CritiqueBrainz, ratings or otherwise.
The thing I would want to use ratings for is to help me decide which music tracks to filter from my main collection of everything to a subset copy for my work computer, or for my phone as listening material while travelling.
But the ratings I want are personal to me. I donāt particularly want to tell the world my tastes by entering them publicly on MusicBrainz. I donāt particularly want other peoplesā ratings.
Some ratings are very objective. The main collection of everything includes language learning content. I definitely want to filter that out of the music files on my work computer or phone. Some are more subjective: if I have two recordings of a work, I might want to filter out one recording and copy the other.
If ratings went away from MusicBrainz and CritiqueBrainz, I would not miss them at all.
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- Iām using rating system on my local files, Plexamp, MB and LB. I like ratings for remembering what I like. Iām listening a lot of music and so many albums have only one play, after one year I forgot most of the names. Ratings help me remember them.
- I donāt want ratings to disappear. I have ratings in four different places but still want to have ratings embedded to an online database.
- If they have merged in any one of these (LB, CB or MB), I support this. Cause I like the idea of one place for ratings. Itās more convenient for me.
- Like most people, I donāt care about other peoples ratings. If I reach my ratings in any way I donāt have a problem.
Also does anyone knows a way to submit ratings from Plexamp and foobar2000 to MB or LB? I want them to be in synch but seems to be manual laborā¦
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You can turn your MB ratings to private in your preferences.
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Iām also among those who not only do not use ratings, but actively hide them using the user script which replaces the pre-NGS setting (as I find them visually quite distracting for a feature I never use). I agree with those who find they clash with the objectivity of other MB data.
If they were removed or moved to another *Brainz project, I wouldnāt miss them.
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Star ratings on MusicBrainz have never brought me any joy, and have never inspired me to do anything ever.
For public ratings, star ratings carry almost no information. We try to encode meaning in a number, but that is lossy storage compressed down to 3 bits. We should be marking release groups (and other things) with the messages that we couldnāt say with stars.
Things like:
- Start with this album / Good intro to the artist (15 votes)
- Artistās best (5 votes)
- Artistās worst (2 votes)
- Excellent narration / Mediocre narration [for audiobooks]
- Every trackās a banger
To mark things with messages like these, I propose a badge system. What I call a ābadgeā is a special tag. Badges are indexed and votable like tags, but they appear in a place appropriate to their message, they each have an icon, and you select them with a click instead of typing them. Like whitelisted tags, badges are canonical, but the list of possible badges for an entity is short (maybe 6 to 8 options max).
Badges are for communicating with others. For people who track their listening privately, the lack of specific meaning in stars works a little better because you define it yourself and interpret it yourself. But it is the bare minimum of what is needed. You have no timeline, no statistics, no correlations. If you want to group rated items you have to create new collections, and itās all just too much work for very little reward. At the very least I would want a chronology of my ratings so I can look back on my listening history year by year.
My personal rating system would be different from @jesus2099ās because all I care about is documenting that I heard something already and noting whether I want to hear it again:
- I love it! Itās a keeper.
- I like it and I want to hear it again
- Iām not sure yet; I need to relisten
- Iāll keep it. I might want to hear it or share it someday
- I donāt care about it
Anyway, back to my badges idea. MusicBrainz allows star-ratings for artists, labels, release groups, recordings, events, and works. All of these have different needs. I only talked about release groups, but I just wanted to outline the main concept.
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Hey your ratings meanings is also what I think, itās equivalent!
And badges, well, I can already put some badges, but I still prefer ratings.
Example of badges:
- interesting booklet
- midi-saster
- morceau dāanthologie
- (not) the best
- top moumoute
- ultra shitty drum machine
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Sure, but none of those tags are canonicalised, you have to know they exist, and the tag names arenāt necessarily good. āInteresting bookletā is vague; ādetailed liner notesā is a little more specific, but not everyone will search for either of those terms. In fact, most people would not even think to search for such terms at all.
Thatās why providing a (short) context-sensitive menu is important. Different options for different entity types, canonical labels, and showing people the possibilities. Itās still uses tags on the backend, but the input UI is different and badge icons can appear in the overview tab where theyāll be seen.
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These are really great ideas, but to help guide the conversation - Iām not sure such a big ratings overhaul is on the table at the moment.
Once we know where the ratings live and how they interact or combine with each site I think we will be in a good position to have fun with it and add new features or rethink them.
Currently we have, across MB, CB and LB: ratings, reviews, love/hate, pins (you can āpinā a recording with a comment on lb).
Edit: I really love the idea of giving more detailed feedback with a single click/vote, as it addresses the issue we have with āreviewā being too intimidating for a lot of people to write something. But it feels like a new feature
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Iām pretty sure I would continue using my funny tags, instead. 
But I almost donāt use tags, anyway. I donāt use genres at all, either.
I just use ratings a lot - and release collection, with highlighter.
this speaks to me on an elemental level; i love it 
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The badge idea reminds me of the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings book. In addition to their 1-4 star rating system, they used a crown icon to indicate particular personal favorites of the editors, as well as a ācore collectionā designation for releases deemed essential to a well rounded jazz collection.
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Iād give ratings two stars.
If you feel you havenĀ“t received enough information then you agree with me
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I use my personal, locally tagged ratings much as others have described. I have some one-star tracks that I nevertheless keep in my collection for reference purposes, but I can readily filter them out of playlists.
I do have an interest in crowdsourced ratings, but as others have noted we donāt have the critical mass that would make MB crowdsourced ratings useful.
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I love the ratings system. I guess I would change it by making it so that the ratings flow onto multiple pages naturallyā¦ Maybe they actually do, but that does not seem intuitive to me.
I would honestly really enjoy being able to rate tracks right from my ListenBrainz page/feed, and this would help the process of maximizing my ratings output. Probably also that of others.
I do not think that they would need to be more prominent - as is, they are rather prominent, and this may actually make some people have a negative opinion of them since the ratings are fairly sparse. I wouldnāt say that they are really sparse to the point of making it feel like a ghost town, but it would be nice if there were more people rating.
Iād be disappointed if the ratings went away, honestly, so please keep them.
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As many here, I use locally tagged ratings (actually two different ratings, system with 16 degrees which translates well to 5 stars; 1&2 stars are rarely used). I wanted to use the MusicBrainz ratings as a less fine backup of my already done ratings (to much of a hassle to ever finish) and as a pre-rating for recordings I do not own yet (also to much friction as Iād have to manually look up each track (if already existing) and especially for new songs, I rather use and easy in-or-out strategy).
Crowdratings are not that interesting to me, though they can be a nice suggestion. Something like badges (or statistics of the love/hate/#listens) would do that job nicer I think.
Generally, album and recording ratings are more valuable, artist ratings feel weird.
I guess I would not miss them in MB and probably used them more of I could directly rate in LB.
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