19loveless91
mag. druž. inf
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- #11
- Posted: 02/17/2012 22:56
- Post subject:
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| cartoken wrote: | | swedenman wrote: | | cartoken wrote: | | This is why I use a mathematical formula to rank albums and not just by my overall feeling for an album. And i'm quite satisfied with the result even if it can never be perfect. |
Just out of curiosity, what is your mathematical formula? I've been trying to come up with one for myself but have yet to come up with a good one. |
I'm taking 3 things in consideration in my formula:
1. The overall score of the album (an addition of points of all songs) around 35% of the final score. Here of course the more tracks there is the greater the score will be.
2. The average rating of the album, about 50% of the final score. Here the number of tracks is not important
3. My overall impression of the album , around 15% of the final score. This is the purely subjective score, of how I feel about the album.
About the songs, to keep it simple, I have a 4 scale rating system:
- 0: will never listen to it again (0 pts)
- 1: Nice (1pt)
- 2:good (2 pts)
- 3:excellent (4pts).
So this is in a nutshell the overall idea, to get to the final score there's a simple calculation to do. Hope it's a clear  |
hehe, here's mine:
I also try to rate songs and then do the calculation for the entire album. My ratings aren't the usual 0-100 ratings that I use for albums, but are in a way a bit similar to yours.
Except my scale is bigger and goes from -1(.25 for especially horrible songs) to +1 (.25 for my very favourite songs). At first I only tried to give 0 points for the average ones and 1 point to the great ones + half a point for when I couldn't decide (and less where the songs were bad). Tried to keep it simple... It didn't really work so now I use quarters of points too (-0.25, 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, ...).
I get the album rating by dividing the sum of all songs' points with the number of songs on the album. Basically if all songs get a 0 from me, then the average score on my scale is a "0", which means the album is neither bad, neither good. I decided that this is equivalent of the 60/100 rating. If it gets less than a 0, then it's most likely getting less than 60 (doesn't happen often with me).
If every song is great and gets 1 point, then it's somewhere between the rating of 95 and 100. If an album is mostly consisted of such songs and has at least 2-3 really fantastic songs, then it's gonna get a 100. I gave that rating to 9 (LP) albums so far, one of them has a overall score lower than "1" (YFIIP), but it has IMO enough of those really fantastic songs + works really well as an album.
Anyway, if the "average" (the quotient) is around a 0.5, then I'll rate the album with 80/100, if it's around 0.25 it's a 70, and if the score is around 0.75 it's a 90. Other than that the lines between ratings aren't that defined, it always depends on my overall feel.
The reason I don't just rate songs with 0-100 and calculate the average is that I would have to rate at least half of the songs a 100 to even have a chance of a high enough average to also give the album a 100. IMO, even an album filled with great, if not exactly "perfect" tracks (i.e. the ones I give a 1.25 and a 100 on this site), can be given a perfect rating.
And I guess I find it simpler like that. It's also easier when there are songs where one is a lot longer or shorter than the others. In that case I usually rate the songs in "pairs" (basically: if one song is 6 minutes long, and the other one 2 - whereas most of other songs on the album are between that - then I give them a score out of 2, the longer track obviously being more important for the score).
The biggest problem with this way of rating stuff is that it excludes other things about the album, the overall feeling, concept, etc. So this kind of scoring really is only a guide of sorts to help me with an approx. rating and rank of the album. There are cases where my genral feel about it was very different to the score, e.g. where I feel one half of the album is significantly better than the other. In that case I go more with what I feel about the album than the formula. Example - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix would be a lot higher on my chart, but I know the score is so high because of the fantastic first half, while I don't have such strong feelings for the second one. It's a bit unfair that I put it among those albums which are consistently good and as such less reliant on individual great tracks.
Shit's definitely not perfect, but it's a good help with ranking stuff in the long term as it assures that what I hadn't listened to in a while doesn't fall dramatically in the rank just because I forgot about it...
It probably sounds complicated as shit, but don't worry I didn't really give it that much thought as it might seem 
edit: fuck me and my inability to express myself in shorter posts
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