Ratings in BubbleUPnP

[Daniel B]

I'm a long time MediaMonkey user moving to a system that runs on something other than Windows.

I've been very impressed with MinimServer and the dev has recently enabled <upnp:rating> to be sent to the control point, initially for use with the MediaMonkey app, but then a little biride told me about BubbleUPnP and I was sold, so I'm hoping that it would be possible to add the rating score to the Now Playing screen.

I appreciate it's already very busy, so what a lot of apps do is display them on top of the artwork at the bottom of the image.

I've had a look at MinimServer, MediaMonkey, MusicBee, Jriver and KODI and only MinimServer, Jriver and MediaMonkey output the ratings to the control point.

MinimServer outputs 1,2,3,4,5 for POPM MP3 and anything for FLAC (although 20,40,60,80,100 is the standard) in <upnp:rating> (xmlns:upnp="urn:schemas-upnp-org:metadata-1-0/upnp/")

MediaMonkey outputs 20,40,60,80,100 for both MP3 and FLAC in <upnp:rating>             (xmlns:upnp="urn:schemas-upnp-org:metadata-1-0/upnp/")
Jriver outputs 1,2,3,4,5 for everything in <pv:rating>  (xmlns:pv="http://www.pv.com/pvns/").

So a generic rule for translating (thus far) to stars could be:

1,20 = 1 Star

2,40 = 2 Stars

3,60 = 3 Stars

4,80 = 4 Stars

5,100 = 5 Stars

I'd be happy to research any other servers if it helps.

Thank you.

[Bubblesoft]

Hi,

Thank your for that information and research, as I was not familiar with upnp:rating.

This would be nice information to display in the app.

I will investigate it, although no promise if/when it will make it.

If it makes it, rating will only be displayed as there is no way to modify it.

Do the media servers that send upnp:rating send it both for individual tracks and albums (for the later, that would be when browsing a folder in the Library tab that holds albums) ?

[Daniel B]

Hi,

I tested MinimServer, Jriver and MediaMonkey (MusicBee doesn't serve to DLNA) and only MinimServer delivered a rating tag at the album level, although I don't think this is by design (it takes the rating from the first track) so I'll speak to simoncn about that.

My understanding of the "standard":

Stars  FLAC(RATING)  MP3(POPM)

1      20            1
2      40            64
3      60            128
4      80            196
5      100           255

I spent a bit more time looking into how the apps (those above) write the rating tags, and discovered that two (MusicBee and MediaMonkey) offer half stars. When writing, MusicBee and MediaMonkey both produced the same results but Jriver stored FLAC ratings as 1-5, oddly.

Taking into account the half-stars of MediaMonkey and MusicBee:

Stars  FLAC(RATING)  MP3(POPM)

0.5    10            13

1      20            1

1.5    30            54

2      40            64

2.5    50            118

3      60            128

3.5    70            186

4      80            196

4.5    90            242

5      100           255

Using all the possible MP3 POPM and FLAC Rating values I fed them back into the servers to see how they'd serve them:

MinimServer mapped MP3's to whole stars (values of 1-5) and served the raw FLAC values.

MediaMonkey mapped MP3's to the relevant FLAC value e.g. 1.5* in MP3 is stored as 54 but it served it as 30, and served the raw FLAC values.

Jriver mapped MP3's to whole stars (values of 1-5), then only served it's own version of the FLAC values e.g. 1-5, ignoring 10-100.

All of the above actually leaves the possible lookup table mostly unchanged, which taking into affect half stars looks like:

Stars  Served  +raw POPM

0.5    1,10    13
1      1,20    1
1.5    2,30    54
2      2,40    64
2.5    3,50    118
3      3,60    128
3.5    4,70    186
4      4,80    196
4.5    5,90    242
5      5,100   255

The "+raw POPM" would be if you wanted to take a belt and braces approach and include the raw POPM ratings just in case some server decided to serve it as is.

If you didn't want to deal with half-stars just include the served values in the tier above/below e.g. 1 Star = 1, 10, 20 (+13?).

I appreciate that I won't be able to rate my actual tracks using BubbleUPnP, but my plan would be to add the track to the relevant playlist e.g. rating1, rating2 .. and perform a periodic export and batch update outside of BubbleUPnP. It would be nice if that could be built in, when clicking on one of the stars, but I appreciate that's a stretch.

Hope this makes sense.

[Bubblesoft]

Thanks again for the research.

Thinking about it again, rating at the album level does not make much sense as I do not think there is file tag for it.