Re: Ratings and throttling

On 16/02/2015 17:10, Joe Martinez wrote:
> I am developing a music application that does the following:
>
> 1) Encourages users to rate their songs by prompting the user to rate 
> a song in his/her library while it's playing, if the user has not 
> already rated it.
>
> 2) Allows the user to choose his/her desired mix of ratings (i.e. how 
> frequently 5-star songs play, compared to 4-star songs, etc.), as well 
> as what frequency of unrated songs are chosen, when shuffling or 
> creating auto playlists.
>
> I was planning on using ID3 popularimiter tags to do this directly in 
> the MP3 files, but I was discussing my idea with Robert Kaye awhile 
> back, and he recommended that I store the user ratings in MusicBrainz 
> instead, so that a user's ratings would be consistent across devices, 
> and also so that MusicBrainz could build up its aggregate rating data 
> for the benefit of other users.
>
Submitting ratings to Musicbrainz is certainly good for the benefits of 
others, but I don't think relying totally on this is scalable especially 
with the webservice as it is. I would recommend you also store the 
ratings within ID3, if you are only ever modifying your ratings with 
your own application then its easy enough to keep them in sync, you 
could also add a Force Sync button to force an overwrite of ID3 field 
with whatever is in Musicbrainz.


Paul