Solved [Kodi v17 Krypton] Ratings a bit mixed up
#1
Dave,

I know you weren't really involved in the whole ratings debate, but it does seem a bit annoyingly mixed up at the moment. I'm not sure if it's still a work in progress and who is working on it, so not sure where else to post. Anyway, here's the current state as I see it:

There's now both a Rating and a My Rating setting. This is consistent with movies where people both like to see the IMDB rating and their own. I can understand that, but for music I don't really care about other people's taste and just want MY ratings to organise my library and create my playlists. It would be really nice to be able to suppress one of the rating options, but that's not the main issue.

I rate each of the tracks on albums and save those in the tags of my mp3s. I use half ratings and therefore have always been able to both create 'half-stars' in iTunes and use them to create smart playlists. Importing these tracks into Krypton these are coming in as a 1 - 10 rating, and they are populating the My Rating setting. So 3.5 in iTunes becomes 7 in Kodi. I use MediaElch to manage my albums, and have used the Rating setting there to rate each of my albums. These are being imported to Krypton in a 1 -5 grade with half-marks and into the Rating setting.

Now, I know that some will say I shouldn't be using MediaElch in that way, or I shouldn't have used halves in iTunes, or whatever. But I think most people have probably got individual ways of doing things, because music never did work like movies. So, I've really got 4 issues:

1. It seems inconsistent to have tracks on a 1-10 scale and albums on a 1-5 scale. Or is there something about the scanning of the DB that I'm missing.
2. It's a shame if star ratings have gone and everythings now going to be in numbers - just a design thing - I like stars not numbers.
3. Programs like MediaElch don't have a My Rating option built into them. Maybe they will develop one to be consistent with Kodi but at present I don't want to edit every album's nfo and will need to think of some way to move the Rating field to the My Rating field. Probably not important in the short-term but the danger is inadvertently choosing update album information and having all my playlists updated with other people's music tastes rather than my own. However, it would be easier if there is a way to alter the mapping of database import so the My Rating field picked up my current NFO's Rating tag.
4. If the above is possible could there be a way to remove the duplication by suppressing the Rating option as it will get a little annoying having both in every playlist creation menu.

If you know anything about what's going on with this I'd be grateful as it is quite a critical bit of the music section of Kodi.
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#2
You are right, I was not involved at all in the ratings debate, nor the implementation. I was new at the time, and moreover I don't use ratings myself so really wasn't paying attention either. AFAIK the work has been done. But I am now the guy that tries to take care of the music library features and functions, and if there are unresolved issues I guess I'll be the one to try to fix it. Smile

1) Both rating and my rating should be 0 to 10, for both albums and songs. That is the intention anyway. Because album rating was 0 - 5 when upgrading from an earlier database version any existing values (in old db) are doubled. There was also a bug in loading from NFO that was trucating values, but is fixed in the nightly you are using. Something in all that is resulting in what you see, but I would not like to be sure exactly what!

2) Numbers not stars is a skins thing. Ask your friendly skinner for what you would like the display to be.

3) Conversion of NFO rating to my rating is going to be a big user issue. I think one of the ratings PRs commented on it being necessary, but nothing was offered as assistence. [Notes: not all devs are as kind an caring as I am Smile]. Honestly some kind of bulk editing of user NFO files is a better conversion approach than have Kodi variably import/export xml tags to different database fields. I am not saying users should edit NFO one at a time, that would be horrible.

4) Sorry suppression is not easily, otherwise I would have made all kinds rating invisible as personally it is all clutter!

Come back on 1) if I have been too flippent. Sorry but ratings, and the thought of time spent tidying up someone elses "bright idea" when I have lots of my own ideas I want to work on, don't bring out the best in me. But I will try.
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#3
Thanks for that. It does seem bizarre to me that Kodi is going against all the established media players out there in order to pretend music is the same as video. But anyway, I think re 1) the assumption that everyone is going to 'upgrade' their library rather than starting afresh is rather a sweeping one. I don't understand why it is doubling the track tags but not the album ones. Finally, I'm not looking forward to bulk editing 2000+ album nfos.

It's a shame that when they started this with a little poll of users they didn't respect the fact that most people said 0-5 with halves was the best. Instead people who don't even use Kodi for music but who dogmatically insisted that music must behave like movies won out. Shame it's all a little fucked up.
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#4
Just for info, the metadata sites have a "total" rating (TADB is out of 10 now since Kodi changed/Allmusic is out of 5 still) and I find it very cool to look through the ratings of other users just as I do my TVShows and Movies.

Just looking at the Top 100 All-time Chart shows some great albums that I have gone on to listen to. Drilling down to say Beyonce's latest album and its medicure scores, also helps my music selection choice.

Hopefully in the future more users like and rate albums/tracks to make this data better and more relevant.

I'm a big fan of rating tracks myself, to remind me of good tunes, so the user rating feature is a big thing for me too. Hopefully both work well in the future as the data matures.

EDIT: I was a big fan of the 0-5 rating system and mentioned it during the PR, but it was mentioned that actually thats up to the skin on how its shown (it can still be 5 stars, half stars whatever the skinner decides). So actually now we have consistency and choice.

I'd try the nightly if album ratings were not doubled, I believe that bug was recently fixed as Dave mentioned.

EDIT2: Also i'm looking at a way to cloud store user music ratings so we don't loose them on each kodi database reset. Just like the Trakt Addon does now for watched statuses. No takeup yet from any python developer, but I've made an API available for anyone to write an Add-on to do it Wink The end game being that you could rate a track on the TADB site and it would sync with every kodi instance automatically keeping your ratings backed up and available to multiple clients anywhere in the world!
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#5
No I am not a supporter of making music like video for the sake of it either. Sad

But I also don't know what other established media players do, is there a standard for scoring systems? It is also impossible to know what the majority of Kodi users want. Those that contribute here are not necessarily representative, the opinion of dev team members likewise. In the end it is down to the volunteers that work on Kodi to choose what they want it to do, and get team approveal, but that isn't a democratic process within the team either. Yet Kodi is pretty excellent all the same Smile

I don't think there was any assumption that users would upgrade rather than start from new, only an attempt to deal with upgrading when it happened. But perhaps there was a lack of concern about existing NFO files and impact of the change on users. Users need an easy tool to edit all their album NFO files in one go that changes
<rating>4</rating> to <userrating max=5>4</userrating>
- I hope that someone will come along and offer one. It is just a string replace on multiple files, not too hard really.

Quote:I don't understand why it is doubling the track tags but not the album ones.
I don't think it should be doing that, can you give me an example song where what you tagged is not showing in Kodi correctly? I have a version of your db, so just the song title and artist and the tag value will give me something to start with.

Here is what I can see Kodi do. It takes initial song my rating values from music file tags (for some tag formats), but does not write edited values back to the music file. It scales the value to be 0-10 before stored in the library. It presumes that all scores in FLAC files (RATING tag) are 0 - 100. In ID3v2 the POPM tag is 0-255 internally, although players that view this value may show it differently. But there is an oddity in the POPM conversion when the email (also part of the tag) is "ratings@xbmc.org" where for an unknown reason it is divided by 51 so will end up 0 to 5 in the library (clearly a mistake!).

Album my rating values can be provided via NFO (<userrating> xml tag) and then edited on the Album Info dialog within Kodi. The imported values are clipped at 10 unless a max value provided.
Album rating values can only be provided via NFO (<rating> xml tag paired with <votes>) or scraping online sources. Again the imported values are clipped at 10 unless a max value provided.

The only way that song rating can be set is via JSON API. This can also be used to set album rating and my rating, and song my rating too. But JSON can not set votes (that go with rating) for either albums or songs, hence nothing can set the song votes.

Technically a system with 0-5 and halves is a 10 point system, so I can see why the change was made.
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#6
Thanks for the feedback guys. iTunes, MediaMonkey, WinAmp going back in time, windows media player. mp3tag, all use 5 star ratings and in one way or another utilise half stars. I understand what you're saying Zag, but for me it's more about consistency with other players than with websites. It's about being able to use the same mp3 to listen on Kodi as I do on my ipod. I agree that so long as we can keep tagging our mp3s on a 0-5 with halves scale which Kodi will always double on import then that's not so much of an issue. It does break the ability to copy smart playlists based on ratings between Kodi and other music players. I know these sound like minor issues but it does add a layer of irritation that just seemed unnecessary.

Dave, I forgot to mention this previously, but even though I've used Kodi since Camelot days, I still always forget that even though you have scanned your media to the library for some reason you still have to then query album information for all albums and artist information for all artists to fully populate the library. I think this is still true. Anyway, I hadn't done that when I shared my library with you previously, so I've stored an updated version for which I'll pm you a link. All the ratings in the album sheet are 0-5 with halves, whereas on the song view they're all 0-10 with no halves. The reason this becomes a problem with the nfos is that our main machine for family use is an Amazon Fire TV and that's using Jarvis, as that's still the stable version and everything works the way we like, but we're sharing files on the NAS, so I can't alter the nfos without buggering up the Jarvis database.

Anyway, I know it all sounds very pedantic, but it's very frustrating if you're a pedant like me. Here's some images to illustrate - I'm using the 20161004 nightly by the way. These are sorted in ratings order - it's not the most bizarre playlist in history.

Image

Image
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#7
Actually, just realised that's not right either. This is the mp3tag folder I have for Texas Flood, they include halves. The Kodi track list I showed above has rounded them all up. Evidently something's gone a bit awry. Sorry for the rubbish screenshot of mp3tag, but I'm using it with Wine on Ubuntu.

Image
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#8
While people have problems with their music tagging quality, it is so much easier to deal with if scraping (NFO or olnine) doesn't happen automatically. Hence I have argued for the default installation to have "Fetch online info on update" disabled. However this does mean that the users have to remember to query the info. An aim for v18 would be for automatic scraping by default, let's see how v17 goes once it is released. Smile

Back to ratings....
Let's take your first album "The Original Soundtrack" by 10CC. It has a rating of 1.5 loaded from NFO which I expect reads <rating>1.5</rating>, and userrating of -1 with no <userrating> xml tag present (but I would have expected 0). The songs from this album all have a rating of 0.0 and various userratings, integers from 1 to 10, mostly 3, derrived from the values scanned from the POPM tag in the music files.

As I said before POPM data is actually 0-255 internally, and historically different players encode/decode this into what they display in different ways. There is a note in the code that
Windows Media Player 9 Series ratings:
1 = 1, 2 = 64, 3=128, 4=196 (not 192), 5=255
MediaMonkey:
0.5=26, 1=51, 1.5=76, 2=102, 2.5=128, 3=153, 3.5=178, 4=204, 4.5=230, 5=255

From minimal experiments it seems that Mp3tag does some kind of conversion like that too e.g. 2=64, 4=196 etc. it does the rounding of your tag values not Kodi. Or maybe it is Taglib when it reads the tag values? I'm not sure, but it isn't Kodi code that I can see. It is all about what are POPM compatible rating values.

You are saying that have the album show as a 1.5 (rating) but songs as 3 (userrating) is off putting.
And that because you also want to run Jarvis, or other players, you don't want to change your files.

You would probably like me to undo the Kodi changes as a solution, but I don't think other team members would support that. Instead can I suggest a work around.

My suggestion is that you modify your NFO files adding <userrating max=5>N</userrating> for every <rating>N</rating> entry. Jarvis will ignore the <userrating> tag, still has the rating values as it expects, and the "max=5" tells Krypton that the value N is out of 5 when loaded. All that is needed is a nice batch editor that adds that line to your NFO files.

The end result would be more consistent album userrating and song userrating values. Both show now as integer numbers out of 10, but a skin could then turn these into starts and half stars that you would like.

Meanwhile if you scrape album rating values from Allmusic you will never get a value above 5.0. I would hope that the scraper could allow for the max value of the data it is loading, but that is not my bit of Kodi.
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#9
Thanks Dave, hmmm I seem to remember having this very discussion with Jonathan Marshall years ago, or maybe that was just a dream after too much cheese. As much as I appreciate the work you've done with the composer tag I think I'll stick with Jarvis for as long as I possibly can and then see where things take us. Briefly looking at other threads going on at the moment your music corner seems like an ocean of calm in Kodiland.
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#10
FWIW Estuary was showing 5 stars for songs rating 5-10 on the OSD and I wrote a ticket on it so now it shows 0-10 stars. They could use half-stars but TBH the stars are kind of small so only really useful on a personal device.

scott s.
.
maintainer of skin  Aeon MQ5 mods for post-Gotham Kodi releases:
Matrix see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Matrix release thread
Nexus see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Nexus release thread
Aeon MQ 5 skin and addon repo 11.1.0
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#11
Got a screenshot of that at all?

I'm all for making ratings look better in Estuary.
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#12
Was wrong. Not Music OSD rather Music Viz info:

Image

scott s.
.
maintainer of skin  Aeon MQ5 mods for post-Gotham Kodi releases:
Matrix see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Matrix release thread
Nexus see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Nexus release thread
Aeon MQ 5 skin and addon repo 11.1.0
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#13
Yeh I think they could be bigger. I actually like the look of the 10 stars there.

The problem really is showing 10 stars on a track list like this in a previous Aeon Nox version:

Image

Thats why iTunes, mediamonkey etc use a 5 star system

Image

Image
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#14
That the library now holds userrating as an integer 1-10 doesn't mean that skins can represent that 10 step system visually as 5 stars with 1/2 marks. I don't know how to do it myself, but it does seem to be nicer visually.
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#15
Yes, thanks to everyone. Zag explained my design view opinion much better than I could, Scott pointing out the music viz view helped even my schoolboy skinning knowledge to work out if I add a folder under Media next to starrating and save 0-10 pngs but as halves I can get it to work - kind of. My bespoke music viz is shown below. The only issue more broadly is understanding how all the xmls call these icons, I'm not saying my design is any good, but it does show we can do it with a bit of work.

I think this is easier to quickly see

Image

than

Image

Haven't worked out where the listing xmls are yet, and I'm still thinking about POPM.
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[Kodi v17 Krypton] Ratings a bit mixed up0