Song ratings, and having them influence random play? (1 Viewer)

[staverton]

Hi all, I just want to ask a few questions on the viability of adding features, or ask as to whether they already exist in another form.

I'm currenly looking at being able to rate songs then having them play randomly but with a better chance of them being picked based on their rating.

On popping open the MP music database I can see there is an iRating field in the Song table. Is this ever used, (within MP)? I realise it's an ID3v2 tag entry, but this is just populated from the MP3s right? There is nothing to stop me from making a plugin that wrote this field (and probably the corresponding tag in the MP3 too), based on user input, and so when I start a random play of my songs, the 'better'' ones play more regularly.

So, do any other MP plugins, or build in functionality provide this, and can anyone point out anything I might need to be aware of before I attempt to write this?

Thanks!

 

[samuel337]

frodo's been dropping hints here and there about adding this functionality in, but I think the whole DTV thing has taken over for the time being..

Sam

 

[staverton]

Well at least that's a a start. From what I've deduced from the plugin apis I have 3 options:

1: Make a seperate gui plugin that played music with a randomise option, (and the ability to rate tracks). This would be poor as you'd want to maintain it alongside the main My Music plugin.

2: Make a process plugin that affected the way the music plugin worked, ie - played random tracks from the playlist based on rating, but I wouldn't be able to add a 'Randomise' button to the interface, and turning it on and off would be a pain.

3: Write a patch for the existing My Music plugin, so that the functionality would integrated and the feature could be easily switched off at will.

Another thought occured to me also, that instead of having to rate a song, you could influence the randomisation based on the number of times the track has been played, maybe with a bias on how recently the song was played so you didnt keep propagaing songs that were your favourite thing 3 months ago.