Question Of Oppinion
 

My itunes has a rating scale. It's of stars, going from one to five. What do you think I should base my ratings of albums off of, specifically speaking? There can be more then five, because obviously it will vary from band to band. In example, I can't judge a band with no lyrics on their meaning. Feel free to also list a band as an example of what you mean.
Current ideas:
1-Quality of music
2-Meaning/depth
3-Originality

Base them off whether you like them and not what anyone else says you SHOULD like them by.

I would base it off how much I actually enjoy it.

Does anyone really even use those stars?

Mine are turtles on their backs.

I tried that but it's really hard to apply how much I like them to the five star system. I want something to go off of, like guidelines. I was just looking for what other people go off of so I can make my own style of judging.

Why use the stars at all?

If I rated all of my music I'd have to spend a lot of time so eff that. Judge it on a combination of criteria though, instead of just one thing.

I use the stars so I can tell if I've listened to something yet becuase I usually have a lot of new, unlistened to music on my itunes. It's also a good way to remember whether or not you like the album very much, if you haven't listened to it for a while. I really put no thought into it though, just sort of a first impression type thing.

I don't know, it looks nifty. It's not like something I want to spend a bunch of time figuring out. Let me rephrase the question: What does everyone else here look for in good music? What qualities about a song or album do you appreciate the most?

just a couple weeks ago i was home sick for 3 days, and i spent half of that time methodically rating every single track on the 250 albums i have on my computer. i set up hotkeys in foobar to make it easier. and i'll tell you what - i'm so glad i did it! making autoplaylists that only play 4 and 5 star tracks is awesome. plus, i weeded out about several gigs of music that i ended up rating poorly. i just have a 30 gig ipod, so it was nice to clear out some space.

i rated each track relative to other works by that artist, rather than relative to my entire collection. it makes things a bit uneven overall, but it works out in the end, and it was much easier to do that way. i just threw an artist on shuffle, and went through one by one.

5 - best tracks. pretty obvious.
4 - great. i can sing along or otherwise dig it. i want these tracks in my shuffle.
3 - average. i don't want them in general rotation, but if i'm listening to an artist on shuffle, i definitely want to hear them.
2 - mostly for intros, vocal tracks, etc. i don't want to hear these at all unless i'm listening to an album start to finish. also, songs i really, really dislike get 2 stars.
1 - other. not tracks i dislike, but stuff like comedy, spoken word, or other things that i want to separate and keep out of my playlists, because i only listen to them deliberately. oh i also use this for one-track live sets, or things like sets recorded off of radio one.

i also have all my albums tagged with the type of release it is - studio album, EP, single, live, bootleg, etc. this helps me keep autoplaylists tidy since i can keep live and bootleg tracks from appearing. live stuff is best listened to straight through.

in the end, this is what comes out. i also have lyrics for about 3/4 of all my tracks now, and i'm slowly filling out the rest. i have high-res album art for 95% of my albums - the rest are just medium-res. i also have artist photos for everything except for compilation albums. it's been a hell of a lot of work getting everything tagged, but it really is fantastic having such a tidy music collection :)

http://notinportland.com/images/b637...oo8q_thumb.png

^I've used the ratings for the same reason (use Winamp by the way). Stars are good for using in search filters in order to easily create playlists.

Just remember to save the playlists with your starred songs since playlists are usually more permanent .. (f.ex one playslist for every possible rating) In the beginning, I was sloppy with this and after rating thousands of songs, having to reinstall the program removed all of that work. The next time, I was prepared and saved playlists with my rated songs. Then, after reinstalling, I could load the playlists and mass-rate everything again.

Thanks for the advice but I promised myself a couple months ago I wouldn't listen to song without listening to the album. So, I'm trying to rate albums.

In Winamp, the rating of an album is the mean rating of the rated songs in that album. Therefore, you cannot rate the album itself, only the songs - then the album's rating is generated from that.

That way, low ratings on songs subtract from it's album's rating .. makes sense unless you use ratings for something else than measuring how much you like a song.

That's the way it is with Itunes too. I'm not going to rate every song though, I just group all the songs in an album and rate them all the same dependant on what I think of the album. My rating system:
1 star: This album is awful, and I might never listen to it again.
2 stars: The album has some good points but I don't really like it.
3 stars: This album is a good album, but I'm not too fond of it.
4 starts: This album is really good and I want to listen to it again.
5 starts: This album is better then good, it's great and I love it.

you only have to do this if you're using a sub-par music player ;)

with foobar, you can create custom fields and embed whatever data you want right inside the MP3 files. my track ratings, lyrics, etc are written straight to the MP3 and are a permanent part of my collection. the only external elements are album art and artist images. i don't embed album art until i'm syncing my library with my ipod, then foobar does that on-the-fly. it's got a steep learning curve, but it's a fantastic player.

anyway if you stick to itunes, be aware that it stores ratings in your music library, not in the MP3s. so back it up regularly in case of a problem.

and lastly - how many albums do you have? so many that you can't keep track of what you like? i have a medium-sized collection, about 300 full albums, and i know them all. of course, i only keep albums i would rate 4 or 5 stars. i used to be compulsive and only keep full discographies, but once i started rating tracks, i realized there were some albums i just didn't like, so i got rid of them...