Post by Tulley Kennedy on Jun 11, 2014 14:36:01 GMT -8
I rate my music. Every song in my library is rated 0.5 to 5 stars with 1/2 star increments. Because I have all this data I feel I should be able to come up with a formula to give each album a rating as well. This turns out to be a hard problem. You can't just average all the songs stars, because you get what I call the "Watery, Domestic" problem.
"Watery, Domestic" is a four song EP by Pavement. Every song on it is great. If you just do raw averages, it makes this the greatest album of all time. I like this EP a lot, but its not THAT good.
You can't just add up all the stars, either, because then 69 Love Songs by Magnetic Fields wins by sheer volume. It also undersells albums like Meddle, which hinge around one epic song. I tried other things like weighting the stars' values such that top tier songs count more than lower tier ones, but still couldn't quite get the numbers right. I recently had a minor breakthrough, and I feel like I am close.
First, throw out all songs rated 2.5 or lower. They are dead to me. Then aggregate the score for:
album rating = Σ (each songs star rating * songs length in seconds)
I tried this on a few albums and the results are promising. My 2 favorite albums of all time get:
Moon & Antartica: 13348.5
I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One: 15919.5
Compared with my favorite rap album of all time:
Doggystyle: 11365
Those numbers look pretty accurate, although I feel my top 2 are closer than those #s indicate.
Its not quite done tho. The main problem is it weights long mediocre songs disproportionately. For example, going through Dark Side of the Moon, Breath (5 stars) is worth 830 points while Us & Them (3 stars) nets 1383 just because its 5 minutes longer. The simplest solution to that is to make the star multiplier more valuable (3 star songs multiply by 3, 5 star songs multiply by 10 or something to that effect) but I think I might be overlooking something even easier. Anyone have some ideas?
"Watery, Domestic" is a four song EP by Pavement. Every song on it is great. If you just do raw averages, it makes this the greatest album of all time. I like this EP a lot, but its not THAT good.
You can't just add up all the stars, either, because then 69 Love Songs by Magnetic Fields wins by sheer volume. It also undersells albums like Meddle, which hinge around one epic song. I tried other things like weighting the stars' values such that top tier songs count more than lower tier ones, but still couldn't quite get the numbers right. I recently had a minor breakthrough, and I feel like I am close.
First, throw out all songs rated 2.5 or lower. They are dead to me. Then aggregate the score for:
album rating = Σ (each songs star rating * songs length in seconds)
I tried this on a few albums and the results are promising. My 2 favorite albums of all time get:
Moon & Antartica: 13348.5
I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One: 15919.5
Compared with my favorite rap album of all time:
Doggystyle: 11365
Those numbers look pretty accurate, although I feel my top 2 are closer than those #s indicate.
Its not quite done tho. The main problem is it weights long mediocre songs disproportionately. For example, going through Dark Side of the Moon, Breath (5 stars) is worth 830 points while Us & Them (3 stars) nets 1383 just because its 5 minutes longer. The simplest solution to that is to make the star multiplier more valuable (3 star songs multiply by 3, 5 star songs multiply by 10 or something to that effect) but I think I might be overlooking something even easier. Anyone have some ideas?