My dream would be a 0-5 system where zero means I don't want to hear that one again. The only thing I like about the 3-heart system is that it only takes one character to display, so I'd encourage the developers to come up with icons to represent the level of favoritism rather than having a string of five horizontal stars that take up five spaces. Maybe five small bars stacked on top of each other, and each click lights up one of those bars from the bottom to the top to indicate the selected level. But that's a small point.
People who don't want to differentiate between what is, say, a 4-star song versus a 5-star song ... just rate your stuff 1, 3, and 5, and don't worry about it. I'm not sure that it's good to make it a parameter and support both systems to try to please everybody -- the more flexibility you build into software, the more complicated it becomes, and the more chance it's not going to work right.
The Autoplaylist feature is so awesome, and this would really help it come alive even more! It would give me so much more control over what I want to listen to.
And 1-5 doesn't have to mean least-favorite to most-favorite, you know! If you want to code it to mean 1 is the music I like to listen to while working out, 2 is my bedtime music, 3 is my make-out music, etc., you can do that and use Autoplaylist to keep those up-to-date for you.
I'm cautious about using this info with the Shuffle mode though. It already feels like the software is trying to figure out what I want to hear based on what I've listened to the most or what I've listened to lately, or something. I'm not sure whether that's true, but it just seems like when I shuffle by 700-song playlist there are about 20 songs that I end up hearing in the first couple of hours every time. It's probably just the luck of the draw, but it sure feels like it's not truly random sometimes. I would rather build playlists with the 5-star rating system, and have the shuffle be random -- that puts me more in control of my own music.
Final point -- when they roll this out, they should map the existing ratings into the new ones so that we don't have to start over completely. Maybe the songs that were rated Heart will automatically be rated 4 stars in the new system, No Heart songs are 3 stars, and Broken Heart songs are 0 or 1 star. Then we take it from there.
Thanks for listening!
