Rating¶

Musium can store user ratings per track in the library. Musium supports the following levels:

Dislike

For tracks that you would probably skip, if they came up in a randomly generated playlist.

Neutral

This is the default level for unrated tracks.

Like

This track stands out as a good track on the album.

Love

This track is among the best tracks in the entire library.

Storage¶

Ratings are saved to the database as a numeric rating level ranging from -1 (dislike) to 2 (love).

Background¶

Rating music on a five-point scale is difficult. Even for a single person, using the available range consistently is hard. Musium is targeted at curated music libraries, so the fact that an album is present in the library already indicates that the album contains tracks worth listening to. A five-point scale spends too much resolution on the low end of the scale.

There is something to say for a simple binary “love” or “like” status, like on Last.fm and many music players. Further nuance than this can depend a lot on the situation and context, playlists are probably a better way for finer-grained classification. However, I do think it is worth distinguishing between “that one nice track on this album” and “this is one of the best tracks in the library”, hence the two levels.