My overly complicated album rating system

This post is a bit nerdy for which I apologise! It all started one day when I realised that whilst it was relatively easy to rate an individual music track it was much more difficult to rate an album.

Various ideas and thoughts ran through my mind:

1. How would I score an almost perfect album which had one track I hated?
2. Should I rate the album based on the number of tracks I like so if I liked 5 tracks on an album with 10 tracks then would I score the album 2.5 stars (50%)?
3. But then what if of those 5 tracks I absolutely love 3 of them but only liked the other 2 - would it still be 2.5 stars (50%) or should it be less?
4. What if the run time of the 5 tracks I loved/liked was only 20% of the total runtime of the whole album - would it still be 2.5 stars (50%) because I like half the tracks or 1 star (20%) because I didn't enjoy the album for 80% of the time I was listening to it?

It got me thinking about some prog rock albums I like and how some of the tracks are just interludes which might be less than a minute long whilst another track may last half an hour. If they were the only two tracks on the album (quite possible for prog rock) then taking an average score of the two would, in my opinion, be unfair and inaccurate. But also, the more I like a track, the higher it should score.

And so enter my overly complicated and probably pointless album scoring system that takes into account the length of the track and how much I like it. It’s probably best if I just show you a snapshot of the spreadsheet which I created (nnnneeeerrrrdddd!) in Apple Numbers using a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers album as an example.

Whilst I refer to it as being overly complicated it's actually quite simple - it's just overkill! It essentially works by multiplying my star rating by percentage representing the length of the track against the total runtime.

Take track 5, "Too Much Ain't Enough", as an example. That track is pretty much exactly 10% of the total album. Therefore, each star is worth roughly 2%. I rated the track 3 stars so it gets a weighted rating of close to 6%. By doing this for the whole album I get an aggregated album score (73.36%) and a star rating which I set up to calculate itself.

Most of the tracks on this album are of an equal length but take something like Close to the Edge by Yes which only has 3 tracks as an example (I must point out that I love this album and whilst "Close to the Edge" is a 5 star song for me I have deliberately given it 1 star here to show the effect!):

In this example, track 1 represents nearly half of the album so each star I give that track is effectively worth around 10% of the album's score. However, track 3 is only about half as long as track 1 so each star is worth only around 5%.

So that's my needlessly complicated album rating system which I feel satisfies my need to find an accurate way of rating albums. However, please do read the side notes below...

Side notes

1. I have rated a few albums but that's it. It's completely overkill and takes a lot of time to manually enter all the data!
2. I appreciate this is a completely overengineeered solution which could be easily solved by just giving a rating on gut feel!
3. There may already be an app or some such that does this automatically - I didn't actually look (and still haven't) as I built this as a fun project rather than as one I would actually use.
4. It is a bit nerdy - I refer you back to the first line of this blog!