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  #31  
Old Mar 9, 2013, 03:27 AM
Hellacia Hellacia is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Namorbia View Post
How many listens do you give to a track before rating it and deleting it? Maybe you will start liking and appreciating the bad tracks after a few more listens?
I know you didn't ask me, but I just want to say: I find this part extremely important. I listen to everything a minimum of 3 times. I really believe that you can't understand a lot of music until you've heard it many times. With game music, I find this particularly true somehow. I often like to track down looping files, like those from the game, and listen to songs on repeat until I can sing them back fully. EDIT: The one thing I've made an exception to is Soukaigi, which I could barely suffer through a single time. And I made it through 3 plays of Tobal No.1 Remixes, so... there are times when you know "no matter how many times I listen to this, I won't like it", and those times should come around pretty rarely.

3 times through for a song/soundtrack is probably not enough sometimes, but I do only have so much time and there's soooo much VGM to listen to, so I limit it to 3 (but nothing less!).

Also, I totally wasn't serious about the Facebook thing. I don't even have a Facebook account.

Last edited by Hellacia; Mar 9, 2013 at 03:33 AM.
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  #32  
Old Mar 9, 2013, 06:53 AM
GoldfishX GoldfishX is offline
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I've been listening to VGM for over 15 years, longer if you count non-official soundtracks (recordings, actual gameplay, etc). At this stage, I know what isn't going to be worth my time for even a second listen. With my system, if I feel there's anything I might remotely regret deleting, it goes on the second line. I don't need 3 listens to kill off, say, a bland piece of Kenji Ito or Tales soundtrack filler or an ambient, mood-setting piece that bores me 10 seconds into it starting or a horrible ending ballad.

And even if I do end up removing something I regret later...who cares? The top pieces are the main ones I end up caring about at the end of the day. I'd rather concentrate on what I recognized as the best tracks than what I removed.
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  #33  
Old Sep 26, 2014, 08:28 PM
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Vert1 Vert1 is offline
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This is what I've come up with for my current and hopefully final rating system:
Quote:
Ratings:
1= Trash
2 = Meh (most likely a one-hit wonder album)
3 = Hit and Miss
4 = Great
5 = The Best
I think the .5 scale is inaccurate (overly complicated = confusion) and it is better to write a review than try to slightly distinguish albums with a decimal place. Another small thing here is that seeing the .5 rating of a half star is slightly difficult to make out. (Found this out when editting out .5 ratings.)
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  #34  
Old Sep 28, 2014, 01:36 AM
Namorbia Namorbia is offline
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I think 1-5 rating is maybe okay for albums, but not for individual tracks. But I would still like a 1-10 rating system for albums too, but of course it doesn't give a good picture like a review would.
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  #35  
Old Sep 28, 2014, 01:40 AM
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Phonograph Phonograph is offline
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vert1: how do you make the distinction between "great" and "the best" ?
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  #36  
Old Sep 28, 2014, 07:34 AM
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Vert1 Vert1 is offline
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Well, I use the words "the best" to convey a different emotional impact than having it simply referred to as "highly recommended" or "excellent". I go to forums looking for these big statements, so I might as well adopt that into my rating scheme. "This is a top 10 album of all time." "This is my top 20 albums I own." Harsh grading. Great to me is very impressive, while the best to me is a quality I see as highly difficult to overcome by the artist or others in the same music genre. As you can see from my ratings I keep the 5-star album ratings low.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Namorbia View Post
I think 1-5 rating is maybe okay for albums, but not for individual tracks. But I would still like a 1-10 rating system for albums too, but of course it doesn't give a good picture like a review would.
Are you able to identify past ratings of tracks on this 1-10 system if you played a bunch of songs on random?
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Last edited by Vert1; Sep 28, 2014 at 07:46 AM.
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  #37  
Old Sep 28, 2014, 09:41 PM
Namorbia Namorbia is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vert1 View Post
Are you able to identify past ratings of tracks on this 1-10 system if you played a bunch of songs on random?
I don't know, maybe not so well. And I think my ratings are always +-1, since depending on my mood I might give it a different rating.

First I used 1-5 with 3 as average, which just looked very stupid, since almost all tracks were 3-5 stars. Then I started using 1-10 and that felt great. But after some time, I thought the half stars look stupid and wanted the simplicity of whole stars only. I went back to 1-5, but adjusted my 1-10 rating to it like this:

5 = 9/10
4 = 8
3 = 7
2 = 5/6
1 = 1-4

So basically I rated 1-10 in my mind, then converted to the above scale. It works quite well. But once I again I started feeling stupid. I couldn't distinguish between the outstanding (9) and BEST EVER (10) tracks. So I went back to 1-10 and I feel like it works the best. I don't mind the half stars any more either

Now I'm trying to stop thinking about "average" as a rating for (5), since an average VGM track is "good, I enjoy it" (7). That's why I now rate my tracks something like this:

10 — One of the Best Ever
9 — Outstanding, I love it
8 — Really good, I really like it
7 — Good, I like it
6 — Some good parts
5 — meh, I don't feel anything
4 — Boring / more bad parts than good parts
3 — Bad, I don't like it
2 — Really bad, my mind feels abused
1 — (never given this rating, I think...)
_________

I'm more interested in distinguishing between the tracks inside an album. I usually listen to one album/game at a time anyway and it's the relative goodness that counts. But of course having a standard way of rating (for yourself) is good. For me, numbers are nothing without some descriptions.

In the end, it's important not to get hung up on the rating thing for too much. Just pick a system that works and trust your gut, if you can't decide on a rating after a few repeat listens. (Though usually tracks get better with more listens, rarely the other way around.)
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