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  #1  
Old Oct 29, 2008, 02:38 AM
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Gaia Gaia is offline
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Default Album rating function

I just had an idea regarding the album rating function and I believe it would be an improvement for this site. VGMdb is currently using a simple 5 star album rating method, though 5 stars itself are sufficient, in my opinion.
I think this way of rating an album isn't exact enough in most cases. I guess the actual result of such a rating is mostly distorted, because it's not that easy to rate an album in a professional way. To make it accurate, the listener had to gather all track ratings manually and calculate the average, but I guess no one is actually doing that.
Wouldn't it be better if the average album rating becomes determined by track rating? That way, it would be possible to get the most exact average. This method would also bring another benefit; a detailed track rating. Track ratings are sometimes more interesting than entire album ratings, in my opinion. Just think, as an example, about doujins and fan made albums. Let's say someone only want's to know how an arrangement/remix of a battle theme was done. The album rating won't help him with that.
Taking this idea on a more advanced level, it would also be possible to gather this kind information through meta-data, but it's actually hard to realize something like that in an easy way. A steadfast concept would be required, otherwise... see Last.fm. Good idea, messy realization.
I for my part have already standardized "RATING"-tags in my audio files, because it's very nice to have it stored and displayed.
Anyway... I hope this conceptional brick might be of some help regarding the future improvements of VGMdb.
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Old Oct 29, 2008, 03:49 AM
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Gigablah Gigablah is offline
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Track ratings will naturally come once we realize the track and media databases, which I've proposed in another thread. We aren't doing it now only because it'll be a nightmare to adapt the individual ratings to the new track entries down the road.

However this is a good time to bring up the question of how album ratings and aggregated track ratings can work together. Should we treat an album rating as a uniform rating for every track?
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  #3  
Old Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 AM
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I think Track Rating is quite useful, and would favor not even having an overall album rating, just the track ratings. But the average of all the individual tracks could then easily be the singular rating which is applied to the album as a whole anyways.

With almost every vgm album I find at least 1~2 tracks which I REALLY ENJOY per album, even if the other 90% of that album is completely uninspiring or mediocre.

This would highlight which songs got it right and hit the nail on the head, while also giving the "constructive criticism" of pointing out filler tracks which everyone would collectively press the skip button on because they suck.

It'd be a nice upgrade eventually.
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Old Oct 29, 2008, 05:24 AM
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Secret Squirrel Secret Squirrel is offline
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I don't know that we'll want to totally throw away the current album system and ratings, as I suspect that there are a number of people who prefer to rate an album, rather than giving individual ratings to every single track. It might be better to keep two seperate ratings, one rated by album, and one rated by track.

By the same token, we will probably want to allow users to rate artists, which would create two (or three) seperate artist scores -- one from artist ratings, one from album ratings, and one from track ratings.

Of course, there might also be an acceptable way to combine all the averages into a single number at each level.
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Old Oct 30, 2008, 01:36 AM
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While I also think this would be extremely useful for cases such as the ones described (being more easy to identify stand out tracks, or for example if you're only interested in 2 or 3 certain game arrangements in a more varied dojin album), it could be really hard to implement (talking from ignorance here) and it would make "gaps" pop out. What about albums which don't have specific track-composer credits (capcom comes to mind) or even worse, missing composer credits altogether?
And there's the "workload" factor in some albums... imagine rating every single song in the Outrun box :P.
There should be an intermediate solution like what SecretSquirrel suggested. Whatever the case, I'm looking forward to any improvement in this regard you might decide to take on.
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  #6  
Old Oct 30, 2008, 02:16 AM
Muzza Muzza is offline
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I'm all for the idea of individual track ratings, and an overall average album rating determined from the track ratings. However one niggle I have would be if this average is indicative of the quality of the album in general. For instance, an album could have its fair share of filler tracks which all score abysmally, but other tracks are pretty stellar and lift the quality of the album significantly. Whether the gap between an average rating and a more generalised rating would be sizable or whether it would be slight and insignificant would vary from album to album I imagine, based on criteria such as the number of tracks, number of filler tracks, etc.

So yeah, basically I think that two different album ratings would work the best, one as an average of the individual scores, one as a general score. But this will indeed be very difficult to implement, I imagine.
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Old Oct 30, 2008, 07:10 AM
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Other good points were raised, and I think a likely scenario would be that a few tracks would get ranked highly as favorites while many other tracks on the album wouldn't even be bothered to select a rank for, so that makes me think about it's purpose really being just a best tracks or highlighted tracks ranking.

With the album ranking continuing as currently implemented, any new ranked tracks could be tallied as a "Top Tracks on this album" display, with maybe the top 3~5 being shown, so the strength of both categories would be illustrated. Best of both worlds? =)

Last edited by Carl; Oct 30, 2008 at 07:23 AM.
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