Winamp supporting ratings tag developement progress request

[MrSinatra]

hey doc,

its been a while, and still the need grows louder, so i was wondering if you've been able to come up with something for including winamp ratings in the id3 tags?

just curious where it stands?

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hlight=ratings

and many more i didn't bother to list here.

[Mythobeast]

I'll second this. This is such an elementary piece of functionality it's amazing that it's been overlooked while developing all the glitz. Rating is a piece of information that is just as important (and often more important) than the name of the artist that created a song. The inability to move ratings with my music severely limits the value of Winamp as a music collection organization tool.

[MrSinatra]

hey Dr.O,

why the cold shoulder? i meant no disrespect, just curious!

also, another really good reason to have this feature is for people who store their music on USB [or network] drives, like me, and forget to have them "on" or attached when starting winamp, (which i just did!)

if u do that, u lose everything b/c winamp auto rescans and finds nothing!

[DrO]

not seeing the thread until now does hinder a reply as i only really follow things on my plugin threads/dev forum/bug reports due to constraints on my time.

as for the whole rating thing, i've just not got the time to commit to it for the forseeable time and really i have to put my own projects first over doing this. plus i no longer have code access which makes it tricker to implement.

maybe if / when real life constraints on my free time ease up (keeping my job and spending available free time with my gf is my main aim now over working for free on a media player) then i may work on a patch to give to the dev team but that's all speculation as i don't know what's happening to me for the rest of the year and onwards...

-daz

[MrSinatra]

did the devs take away code access from you? why? seems rather short sighted of them.

regardless, i totally understand your position, but is there ANY 3rd party plugin maker out there willing to take this on?

[DrO]

i've just not been around to get a few access rights updated to allow me to get to it and tbh if i'm not around there's no need for me to chase it up.

i'd really not want to see this done as a 3rd party plugin as it'd be a duplication of resources and integration would be a lot clunkier than is ideal if done as a few minor prefs changes in the native player preferences. (just my 2p)

-daz

[MrSinatra]

hey, i'd love to see it be native, but i think you don't realize how desperate those of us who want this feature are... to me its insane that this isn't yet part of winamp.

to me the 3 biggest missing features of winamp are:

1. ratings in tags support (allows persistence and cross app'ing)
2. support for comp tags (just read/write/display them, winamp doesn't have to 'do' anything with them)
3. multiple column heirarchy support (lots of threads for this too, and the example i cite is wanting my albums in artist [or album artist] -> year -> alphabetical order, as opposed to artist -> alphabetical order. sure, you can click year, but that then supercedes artist)

those are my top 3 wtf things about winamp, i just can't believe they think "orgler" and other obscure things are more important than those 3 obvious and vital things.

[DrO]

you have to remember the biggest thing about Winamp and that it's a corporately owned product and that pretty much explains most people's wtf reactions to the player over the years. the next thing is that too many people want Winamp to do too many different things and really the player is showing the conflicts of this issue far too much now but that's a making of it's own and something that it's stuck in unfortunately.

-daz

[MrSinatra]

i totally agree and understand, and i realize the corporate ownership of it insofar as direction and development of the product is not a trivial issue...

...but having said that, i think any honest assessment of the player, from an impartial viewpoint, would name the 3 things above as the "next logical steps" for the product to take. these aren't out of left field, these are features winamp needs to have just to achieve parity with the competition. these 3 things are, imo, just baby step advances, albeit necessary, and not a big deal to implement considering where the app is currently.

i hope you don't think i'm being argumentative, i'm just trying to make my case. i also want to express my thx to official devs and the volunteers like you, who have made a great app i love to use.

[dkordik]

If the core team does do this, I really hope they use the "ALBUM RATING" tag instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

[MrSinatra]

album rating tag?

songs are rated per song, using POPM as per the id3 standard.

can you link to what you are talking about?

[dkordik]

Popularimeter (POPM) was designed to contain a 1-255 rating and playcount information for an individual track. Some prefer instead to use the RATING tag for individual track rating. But I'm not especially concerned about individual track rating, so I don't care what happens in that space.

ALBUM RATING is the de facto standard for rating the album/compilation/ep itself, and is stored in the TXXX frame. You can read more about it here: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...howtopic=31530

[MrSinatra]

thats fine... but lets do one thing at a time... and its almost impossible, so far, to get winamp to support TXXX frames.

as to how POPM works, i know, its all detailed in the many links above. you could simply rate all songs on any one album the same, and get the result you want.

[dkordik]

I think we've discovered why nothing ever happens in this area. The foobar2000 approach to tag support is the only one that can make everyone happy.

[Bilbo9955]

Originally posted by dkordik
I think we've discovered why nothing ever happens in this area. The foobar2000 approach to tag support is the only one that can make everyone happy.

If you love foobar so much, great, go use it. We like Winamp and are simply looking for a few minor changes to help us along. We don't want Winamp to be like fubar2000 that is why we don't use fubar2000, and we don't need anyone trying to make the request so complicated that nothing gets done!

[dkordik]

Bilbo9955, please don't make this an "us vs them" thing. I've been a Winamp fan as long as anybody. People should be able to talk about how other players tackle difficult problems without someone getting defensive and saying "if you like player X so much, gtfo and go use that!".

The tag approach I was referring to is allowing users to use whatever tags they wish, not just predefined ones. This might be applied to Winamp rating, for example, by having a setting in the Media Library preferences to allow you to choose what tag is used when you rate an album from the media library. I think this would actually be the *least* complicated way to solve the problem for everyone. If you have a simpler solution, that's excellent, please share it.

[MrSinatra]

just FYI, someone, DrO presumeably, changed the title of this thread from "Dr.O, how goes RATINGS development?" to what it is now.

it would be great if someone from nullsoft would comment as to if they ever plan to do this, OR if a 3rd party plugin writer would try to create such a plugin.

any takers?