Rating over 3K+ albums - Shortcuts?

[joelha]

Does anyone have any tips for expediting the process of rating a fairly large number (3,000+) of albums?

 

I'm using JRMC18.

 

I realize that as the ratings are a product of my personal preference the answer might very well be, "There are no shortcuts".

 

But I thought I'd ask just in case.

 

Thanks,

 

Joel

[One and a half]

Get a very good chair and an exceptional mouse.

[ForkInBrain]

Does anyone have any tips for expediting the process of rating a fairly large number (3,000+) of albums?

 

Personally, I'm apt to be lazy with ratings. The time I put into rating things doesn't usually transfer from system to system, and so usually has a lifetime of maybe a few years before the system I entered them in becomes obsolete (or craps out and corrupts my preferences file, re-setting all my ratings).

 

Now, if my ratings were stored permanently "in the cloud" and shared across Pandora, iTunes, and MOG, Amazon, and every other music site and music sales site, and the ratings were used to good effect to surface cool stuff I might like, then I'd be interested in rating things more. The skill at which Pandora surfaces (and suppresses) music is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. Heck I'd even like it if they were integrated with Ticketmaster and every other music live music ticketing and promotion system, so I'd could discover good, nearby, live music.

 

But back to your question, maybe you don't have to do all that work. Through my day job I've learned a little bit about rating systems and human entered ratings on things like songs. Assuming your program is smart enough, you don't need to rate every song. If you rate what you especially like highly, and what you especially don't like low. The software, if fancy enough, can infer reasonable ratings for every song in your collection based on what other people have rated. This is how, e.g., iTunes "Genius" playlists work. They effectively profile you and figure out that you do or don't like, say, blues with electric guitars and gritty female lead singers. Though that works off data collected from all iTunes users and requires pretty fancy software "in the cloud." I don't know if the software you're using is that fancy.

 

For un-fancy software, I think ratings are really just a lazy way of deleting songs from your collection (rate 1 star) or creating "music I love" playlists (rate highly). There is no way to shortcut manual rating for this. In these systems I don't see the point of anything but a 1 star or a 5 star rating.