[ID3 Dev] How good is this song? Storing rating metadata

[Wyatt]

Well it's not a matter of working out what I *want* to support so much as
solving a problem introduced by what others partially *do* support before it
gains multiple nonstandard
implementaions<http://www.id3.org/Compliance_Issues>to resolve the
issues as initially presented (metadata evolves as people use
it and discover new applications for it).  Currently, I don't know of any
player with a user rating system that supports encoding this particular
piece of data to ID3 precisely *because* there's currently no room for it in
the standard frames, but we've can't help but accept that that doesn't
necessarily stop them.

Looking back over the documentation, I note that having multiple TXXX frames
*is* actually allowed (I hadn't acutually caught that before, somehow),
making it potentially acceptable, but at least to my sensibilities it still
screams of being a hack--  if we accept that using any particular software
shouldn't have any chance of changing the results of a user's experience,
then using a TXXX frame would rule itself out by the virtue of having no
standard name for the Description of a user rating.  In a bad case, we might
end up with five or six popular audio players all storing their ratings in
the same basic manner with slightly different descriptions such that they
are all mutually incompatible.

For the time being, I'm not going to implement rating storage for any audio
players, pending further discussion of this matter, but my targets are
Amarok, Quod Libet, and Rhythmbox currently, and whatever happens to hove
into view after that.  I live in Linux space, so while I might file bug
reports outside, most of it cannot be fixed by me.

73,
Wyatt

PS:  Having said all that, if it's important, I can survey at least a few
audio players, though I don't have any Windows or MacOS machines around me.

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 22:20, Ben Bennett <fiji at ayup.limey.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:40:22AM -0400, Wyatt wrote:
> > So what do you suppose I should do?
>
> Ugh.  Nasty problem.  I'd survey the field and see what the other
> programs are storing... BUT iTunes doesn't even put the rating in the
> ID3 tag.
>
> So, once you know what the others do, work out which you care about
> supporting then support one or more of the tags they write.
>
> That said... if I didn't care at all about the other programs, I'd
> just use the POPM field and map the 0-255 range to whatever I wanted
> to display.  So 0-100 would be mapped with a multipler (2.5248), and
> the effective 0-10 range of stars would be mapped with (25.248) with
> the hope that was what other implementations would do...
>
> If you do survey any other programs, please put notes about this in
> the wiki, and/or report back to the list... it is something I am
> intereted in and I assume others are too.
>
>                        -ben
>
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