[skj88]

I am finding some odd behaviour with MP3s (mp3s only, not flacs). I have several hundred mp3s that do not have a rating (ie, rating is -1). I am running Eden with a MySQL backend on a Windows 8 server. I have confirmed that the rating is not set by viewing file data in MediaMonkey and Windows explorer. But XBMC in the MySQL db has randomly assigned ratings to these unrated songs. This does not happen with flac files, but only with mp3s. It looks like XBMC is trying to add a rating where there actually isn't one. And it is not doing it with all mp3s. This only happened with roughly half of my unrated mp3s.

I was thinking it might be the ripping software somehow, but CDs that I know were ripped with the same software have some songs with these mystery ratings and some that do not. If it was the ripping software, I think the issue would apply to all songs that the if ripped, not just some randomly spread around.

I did notice that the mystery ratings are consistent within albums (even though the ratings are applied at the song level in mymusic18.song). All mp3 files from a particular album have the mystery rating or do not have it. So perhaps a scraper is adding them? I have my music scraper set as the universal scraper. I checked in mymusic18.albuminfo and the ratings for the albums in question are -1 so they do not match the rating that is applied to the song file.

This ain't killing me, but I think it's odd behaviour. I have confirmed that changing the rating for the file overwrites this incorrect rating, so at the worst this is a temporary problem. Thought I should report this as this is unexpected behaviour (at least, unexpected to me).

[jmarshall]

It's almost certainly because the tags exist in the files. XBMC only storings ratings in 2 instances:

1. It's in the tag.
2. You rate a song in the library.

The second one doesn't allow you to rate anything other than 0..5, so if you get -1 then that's due to the tag.

mp3 tags are completely non-standard for these things. Note that there *may* be changes in Frodo for this as we've moved to taglib for tag reading. This doesn't guarantee it's "fixed" or that it hasn't broken other things!

Cheers,
Jonathan

[skj88]

Thanks for your reply. I checked with a few more tag editors and I finally found in Windows Media Player that it reflects the rating that I am seeing in MySQL. I guess you are right about the lack of standardization in mp3 tags can lead to some tag editors updating one field, while another updates a different one. From my research it appears that Rating is one of the least standardized tags for mp3s. At I least I know the incorrect ratings will be overwritten when I finally go through and rate them all.