Ratings are the most imporant part. Don’t remove that feature.
Make it out of 10 : it is the best scale for mass rating, it has a middle and is fairly simple. The 1-5 stars rating on MusicBrainz is awful : it is what makes goodreads and other tracking sites unusable. People still have the choice to hide their ratings.
So does 1-5, the middle number is 3!
2 Likes
Isn’t 2.5 the middle? 3/5 filled stars visually looks like you’re rating it above average… I feel like I might be opening a mathematical can of worms here 
2 Likes
3/5 = 60/100.
2.5/5 = 50/100.
1 Like
0 means not rated.
So if you rate something, you have 5 values (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), the one in the middle is 3 (neutral) as it has 2 ratings above and 2 ratings below.
Like in my previous scale:
- I really don’t like it
- I don’t like it very much
- Not bad
- I like it
- I love it
6 Likes
Frankly I’m surprised people who have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of tracks don’t have some kind of personal ranking system so that their computer can sort and generate playlists.
MusicBrainz ratings would see more use if they could be consumed as easily as they can be submitted.
2 Likes
One slightly off-topic thing I wanted to say, @aerozol, is that, before changing stuff that is already good enough, the only thing that I really miss and that would be ground breaking in MB is collection item markers.
Update
I know why this came to mind, it is not completely off topic.
I use both in conjunction to know which releases I should try to find, looking at my 5 star recordings I don’t already have, those that are not marked in purple:
And also many times, for compilations, or for bonus track album editions that I don’t have.
If I already got the opportunity to listen to the missing tracks and rate them, I know if it’s worth it to buy this release, even if I already have almost all the other tracks (in purple).
I look at the ratings of the missing tracks to decide:
3 Likes
I use the recordings ones a lot to tag everything I listen. Before I was relying on a Foobar plugin but that was problematic since they were stored only in tags (they could easily disappear) and do not allow to tag music I don’t have on drives.
Regarding my rating I used same as for my photos, similar to other users except the “middle” being at 2 stars
- Not yet rated
- Bad: Songs I don’t like or strange experimetal records
- Average: Can listen to it but no particular vibes
- Good: I like it but not all the time
- Awesome: Always happy to hear it
- Perfection: 4 stars songs that I listenned hundred of hundred times
I prefer as it allows to have more “depth” to rate what I can listen to.
Sometimes using the Album tag when the full listenning of a release makes a different experience than the separated songs.
7 Likes
I avoid them for no reason that’s MB’s fault. I’ve historically tried to use them primarily to feed randomising playlists. But this has failed in every way imaginable:
- Yesterday me doesn’t agree with today me on whether any given artist is worth listening to, nor will tomorrow me. So I build up all these overlapping mood tags that become white noise. Eventually I’m back to flipping through albums alphabetically.
- Whenever I change platforms (player program, device, OS, preferred music borg) my ratings are gone or damaged.
Conceptually I’d love to see reliable ratings. But since I don’t trust my own opinions, I certainly don’t trust those of The Crowd, just as no individual in The Crowd would (or should) trust mine. And I can’t get my own ratings to be either consistent or persistent. I’m also trained by Amazon to believe that 1-star and 5-star ratings are bought.
So when I see ratings, I pretty much ignore them as damaged goods. It was a good idea, but not for me.
3 Likes
Realized I just answered partially to the question:
So based on my usage I’m quite happy with the current star rating system, don’t take much space and easy to use. What maybe miss to increase usage is the ability to mass tag, it’s available within Picard but may be useful to have this option directly within the main website (There is a high “entry cost” for users who want to start using this feature, imagine tagging one by one 200 releases and their associated recordings :/)
On the contrary what I regret not to have is a comment/critique section. ex: How to find the proper release to acquire for Miles Davis - Kind of Blue? There are many discussions about the quality of the different remasters, mono/stereo or even the bitrate.
At minima a comment section at bottom of page would be useful but we could imagine something better could be done: Positive/Negative votes on reviews, Professional/Magazine reviews section, Filter by rating given,… won’t develelop too much as I suppose you already thought of that with the CBz integration.
Then when I’m adding rating I usually also set genre, other tags or link entities to collections. Not sure you integrated those in your initial questions but seems related, could be all handled together under “Users contributions”
Some ideas:
-
Genre & Tags:
- Allow to mass tag (at least in Picard). ex: As of now we need to flag recordings one by one if we want to see it appear on all the releases linked. (ex: I could flag Nevermind from Nirvana as “Grunge, alternative rock, rock” on RG level then it will only appears on Albums linked, not on compilations relying on).
- Allow to mass tag from Collections (if upper not possible). ex: I got a collection of recordings and I want all the entities from it to receive the Collection name as tag
- Allow hieararchical tags (quite used in photos tags https://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/3/32/Adding_Tags_in_digiKam_7.4.png). Today the system allow to add “/” (ex: award/Diapason/Diapason d’Or) but there is no tree view
- Allow to see herited tags. For instance some tags are placed on RG but I dont see them directly on release page and similarly it could be set on recording but I neither see them.
-
Collections or in a more general way listings/grouping of entities:
Compare to genre/tags/stars which are shared easily among users it’s not the same story for those. Regretable as it’s a good way to discover new musics. When taking time to look around there are interesting collections made by users, some technical (missing covers, cleaned up composers, Released on Vinyl but not CD…) some regarding reviews (Rare Groove A to Z, quoted/heard on blogs/magazines/radios, awards like Qobuzissime, Songlines, The Wire…) some based on content (Women in Jazz, Silent Albums, Sold for more than >$500) or just funny ones (Bands with Dinosaur names, Covers design,… examples below for those.- Allow to select all editors as contributors
- Create an homepage listing them all with search options
- Review display on entity pages ex: Only display the ones where the entity is listed then for addition we could have an “Add…” link or review the process to be similar as for Series
- Allow to see covers grouped on Collection pages (for the funny ones like below
Musicians Who Posed Nude for Album Covers
About Objects, Design
Around Colors:
1 Like
On my own digital music collection? I use it for two purposes: Firstly as a record of how much I like a song (usually in comparison to others on the same album). Secondly as a way to control which songs are synced to my phone and for automated playlist creation.
On MB? I don’t. Over the years I’ve clicked a few stars out of curiosity or by accident but that’s about it.
When ratings were first implemented in MB I thought it would be a nice way to save my ratings somewhere online where Picard could retrieve and store in my files ID3 tags. It certainly would have been nice to do that recently as I have been gradually re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC (a pandemic lockdown project that’s really over run!) and to rid my digital collection of MP3s of varying quality where possible. The one holdback to using the feature on MB way-back-when was there didn’t seem to be a way to mass upload existing ratings from my files so I never bothered. Although in fairness to MB I never actually looked into it or enquired. Maybe there was a way to do it, but the time has now passed.
On MB? Shrug and go about my day. On the actual music files on my computer? Ooo I’d be p***ed! 
2 Likes
@aerozol If you want a full “all eyes on” discussion, you should be aware of an oddity of this forum software… 
When this post originally appeared, it was not tagged. Then more categories got added at the top of the page: MetaBrainz, musicbrainz, listenbrainz, bookbrainz, critiquebrainz, ratings
This has triggered an odd side effect of this forum. This forum allows topics to be muted. This means anyone making use of that feature now does not know about this topic. I mute those last three *brainz, this has the effect I only see this topic has been updated when I am logged out.
Even stranger, the “MUTE” overrides the “TRACKING” option.
So, opposite to what you’d expect, if you need more people to see this you may need to remove some of the tags. 
2 Likes
I always wanted to use ratings to help me build playlists and better organize my local music library, but so far I have failed doing this consistently. One of the biggest obstacles for me was that I frequently switched music players and re-tagged and reorganized my library, often loosing local ratings in the process. So what I actually wanted was the ability to have all my ratings stored on MB as a central database and be able to sync this to my local files.
Unfortunately the rating support in Picard (which I originally added) is lacking and not fulfilling the expectation. I think if this would be fixed (something I had hoped either someone would do or I would eventually do myself) and ratings could be reliably synced between MB and my local collection in a way that makes the ratings available in the various music players I would make more use of this feature again.
On the other hand I have also come to the conclusion that a simple like / dislike functionality, as it is available in LB, is enough for my needs. I don’t need detailed levels of ratings, where even a few months later I can’t justify my choice of 4 or 5 (or even 4.5) stars given and it looks rather arbitrary.
9 Likes
I believe charts are a major feature that’s missing from all Brainz projects. @chancey put together a prototype that gets the idea across
5 Likes
Hello all! I think it’s been long enough, and I have gotten round to summarizing the feedback.
Quite an interesting spread!
My summary is that everyone is very different in their use of ratings. Some people consider them critical, some people really don’t like them. I would not remove them, but also not make them more prominent, unless it was customisable. Having them sync and display consistently across all the MeB services, and possibly other services/players/local files/Picard, should be a focus.
Rating usage:
(note that the same person can be represented in ‘use elsewhere’ and in one of the MB bars)
All feedback, summary:
(note that the same user can be represented across multiple items as well as sub-items)
Don't use ratings in MB IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
- Don't want to ever use them IIII
- More likely to use them if they synced with local files/media players (import/export) IIII
- More likely to use if there were more (chicken/egg situation) III
- More likely to use them in LB II
- More likely to just use like/not like II
Do use ratings in MB IIIIIIII
- Discovery and what to get/listen to II
- Organise playlists I
- Remembering what I like I
Do use ratings in CB II
Use ratings in other sites IIIIIIIIIIII
- Other music site/media player/tags IIIIIIIII
- GoodReads III
- RYM II
- Professional music reviews/sites I
- Other I
Display
- Leave as is IIIII
- Would like to hide them IIII
- Make more prominent II
Half star vs whole star
- Prefer half star ratings III
- Prefer whole star ratings II
Misc
- Have them sync + display across all MeB sites IIIIIII
- Ratings don't mean much IIIIIII
- Ratings are personal IIIII
- Ratings are better with context III
- Important to have it usable via Picard II
- Not objective enough for MB III
- Have 'badges' III
- Be able to rate songs from LB II
- Want ratings gone completely I
- Allow to review specific releases I
8 Likes
Meanwhile, are there any concrete plans to do something about MusicBrainz ratings?
I find them to leave a rather bad impression in their current state (as in, make MusicBrainz appear outdated/dead/irrelevant):
- I just checked out this famous Tom Lehrer guy Tom Lehrer - MusicBrainz; turns out MusicBrainz thinks he’s a solid 3/5 (one private rating)
- The other week I came across the acclaimed salsa album Siembra Release group “Siembra” by Willie Colón & Rubén Blades - MusicBrainz; the experts at MusicBrainz think it’s a sucky 2/5 (the opinion of one inactive hard-rock-interested editor)
Now you might argue I should just go and rate them higher if I think that’s deserved, but the current ratings make me prefer to abstain since voting feels like validating the existing ratings.
Assuming there’s no elaborate plan involving ListenBrainz and CritiqueBrainz in progress, my “quick fix” suggestion would be to not show the actual star ratings unless there’s a minimum of say 100 ratings on an entity.
3 Likes
You are describing a lack of votes.
Whatever the system, it will be the same.
I’m a user of MB ratings and I don’t mind the lack of votes, at all.
I don’t really need the votes by others, but seeing them is still nice.
I would also be fine with 3 star ratings but I prefer the current 5 star ratings (and no more).
100 ratings is probably way too high a bar, as I don’t think even Rate Your Music has numbers that high, outside of quite popular albums. that said, maybe showing the number of ratings next to the stars could be good, I know most places with ratings to this, like Amazon, for instance
1 Like
there are 2 sites where i ofter use ratings:
- untappd (for checking in beers)
- up to 5 stars can be given
- they have 1/4 of a star that you can give (3.75 for instance)
- i mainly have only a few ratings that i use:
- 3,5 its a nice good beer that i would drink (maybe)
- 2 - 2,5 its not good but i can still finish it.
- below 2 its not drinkable and should not be made
- 4 or higher best beers ever, would drink this on a regular basis.
- they show 3 rating next to each other:
- your personal average rating (you can check in the same beer multiple times and each time it can be a different rating)
- your friends average rating
- everybody’s average rating
- trakt (for checking in movies/series)
- up to 10 hearts
- no half harts
- they add a word that explains each hart:
- Weak Sauce
- Terrible
- Bad
- Poor
- Meh
- Fair
- Good
- Great
- Superb
- Totally Ninja!
- Weak Sauce
main things i like:
- different ratings (personal/friends/everybody)
- your music taste will often be in line of the music taste of your friends, so it could be that the ratings of your friends is more valueable then the ratings of everybody
- the words that explain what a rating mean
- if everybody uses a different scale on what each star in the rating mean then you can’t compare ratings because they mean something different.
- if there are words that sort of explain what the rating mean then the scale is something more unified.
- for instance:
- i never want to listen to this again
- not for me
- its ok
- i like it
- i can listen to this on repeat
for me currently i only have 3 ratings:
- i like it (i will put this on by myself)
- its ok (i will not put this on but if it comes on i won’t turn if off)
- i don’t like it (i don’t want to listen to this ever)
4 Likes
I’m in the “hides ratings” camp. I’ve only ever rated things by accident (and didn’t even know it at the time). As long as I can avoid them, I don’t care what anyone else does with them.
2 Likes