www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

http://rateyourmusic.com/board_message/message_id_is_228000_and_board_id_is_1

The 'compare' feature is kinda nice, as maybe it will someday turn me on to something great. Nothing yet, though.

What is most interesting about it is that it'll take your collection and match it against similar ones and show you the differences, etc. And the recommendation engine is way better than anything else I've used. It blows Amazon's out of the water (for instance, it doesn't just pick the 15 records that you *don't* have by one artist that you said you had one record by, and then say 'Look, buy these, stupid!')

Granted, the site is lacking in some features and is slow as molasses, but I give it a big thumbs up regardless.

This was totally worth the time, if only to find out that I need Cowboy In Sweden and Secos & Molhados--two albums I didn't even know existed.

Because it is better. "Tales" is underrated, although not among true lovers of prog rock at its most pomp and symphonic. And I have never given a damn about lyrics anyway.

They should steal the rating system from Launch, where anytime you see the name of an artist, album, or track, you can click on the five-star scale to rate it without having to click through two more pages.

The ratings *system* doesn't suck, it's that the *implementation* of it sucks (clicking two/three pages to rate something). I'm sure it's something he's going to fix soon. The database has some good data in it so far, but it needs a lot more people to get involved. I agree, until he makes it easier to just do the 'one click' rating, a lot of people won't bother.

Making an ILM user list - please post your account name! (me: xox)

-- Keith C

so, is this fixed yet? I don't have the patience to even start the process, but otherwise a nice site!

conclusion:
Dud.

classic if you are a teenager who likes metal and emo maybe.

If I bring up 14 Joni Mitchell albums I own I *should* be able to just run down a list with checkboxes/javascript shouldn't I?

And there aren't any kind of Winamp/iTunes plugins? to automatically add stuff to your profile? What are these people on?

How would this work in RYM's format? Sounds like last.fm, which you can add to the now playing field of the profile.

What are these people on?

The site is mainly run by one person (in his free time). Not to make excuses for the site, but suggestions for improvements are taken all of the time.

The go! page is a little faster for rating groups of albums.

It's just that I'd actually like to put my own collection on there but find the length of time it's going to take utterly daunting, and potentially RSI inducing... unless I do it incrementally over a period of months... and then it doesn't feel like fun anymore, but work :/

I did see that go! page earlier, and it's useful, but even that still has unnecessary actions - one to select the album, and one to claim it, why?

The site looks great, and is quick but I'm baffled at how low down the priorites the ease-of-use factor seems to be for one of it's main functions.

I guess the problem is the cataloguing nature of the site. When you click on an album you usually get options for format (cd, vinyl, digital, etc.) and sometimes half a dozen versions (various regions, reissues), with options to rate and review. A compromise could be to just select the default version and n/a for format (with just check boxes?). I'll see if this has been suggested. Are you wanting to rate them?

Thanks for considered answers to my not very carefully considered beefs btw! :)

Perhaps searching for artist and format could be done initially to filtering the choices? Country of origin even, I know (for instance) that 90% of my Björk records would be One Little Indian (UK) and not Elektra (US & Other) releases.

The creation of personal lists is a different function from cataloguing what's in your collection. However the list format may be a simpler and more convenient method of presenting your music interests by year anyway, and you can still place notes / personal reviews on the list pages.

I don't use the rym website for personal ratings, so i am the wrong person to ask about these features.

Check out the singer on the cover. That's your expression that is - when you listen to this album.

I've never even LOOKED at the message boards so I don't know about those. I've also never paid much attention to the general rankings (this record is ranked #17 for 1988, etc., though the SINGLES ratings can be interesting.) I just look up (and rate, sometimes even review) the stuff I like and then sometimes look up other people who like the stuff I like and see what else they like (and take notes if it's something I've never heard or maybe gave up on).

Also, I like the reviews. But then I tend to prefer "real people" music reviews (especially when they're short and to-the-point) over reviews from professional critics. And the reviews on RYM are, I find, a little more varied than those on Amazon. Amazon reviewers tend to be either gushing fans or venomous haters. There's more middle ground on RYM, I find.

http://rateyourmusic.com/~JasonHernandez

So this + wikipedia (and amg I guess) basically makes Discogs obsolete, no?

like Woolworths makes HMV obsolete?

seriously, NO.

I like rateyourmusic fine but it is anything but thorough, detailed, informative as any kind of online catalouge.

Especially so for the kinds of music (dahnce) that don't tend to be consumed in an album format.

AMG made itself obsolete...

I may have been bitching unfairly upthread btw. It DID look like an incredibly daunting process at first but (if you're fast with keyboard shortcuts & window tabbing & can get iTunes to fart out some kind of text list in advance...) I actually found it pretty easy to get my collection on there in the end. ok I needed a spare afternoon but yeah, it's got some fun features and some moderately useful ones too.

The update has certainly made RYM a bit more user-friendly.

have encountered that person under different usernames. wish him only ill

disappointed they havent written the reviews to match

presence of arditti string quartet is like the canary in the coalmine of a fucking twat

György Ligeti said of Evgeni Koroliov's take on Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge that 'If I am to be allowed only one musical work on a desert island, then I should choose Koroliov's Bach, because forsaken, starving and dying of thirst, I would listen to it right up to my last breath'. I choose to believe that Ligeti the RYMer would have given it a full 5 stars. Entracte7, however, only gave it 4.5 stars (one of only five records out of 13,276 to have been granted this most prestigious distinction), because he's just that much of a monocled gentleman.

Don't you dare diss the Ardittis, LJ.

(I know exactly what you mean, though).

the only rational response is to rise up and violently aurectomise our monocled oppressors

if you go down to 3.5 you get the first sign of rock music: can, talk talk, velvet underground. unspeakably fucking lame

Stop being such a rube and raise yourself to the 4th star via the Ardittis' Neue Wiener Schule cycle (which is indeed quite good but often idiosyncratic and hardly the last word on these works – not to mention that if we're going to be completely honest here, Berg's quartets are more consistently compelling than Schoenberg's; why was half a star not docked from the latter?).

The mind boggles at the sheer amount of dedication that's gone into this gesamtkunstwerk of hate.

Also, that wishlist of nearly 10,000 records he's begging to one star lol

His film ratings are incredible as well.

loving this guy's work

LOL half a star for all the Oasis albums except Morning Glory, which gets a whole one. Clearly a populist at heart.

I wonder if he really listens to all of those half star albums he rates. Either this guy has a real obsession with listening to stuff he doesn’t like or he’s confident enough to give bad ratings based on a very cursory exposure. Normally if something doesn’t appeal to me I wouldn’t take the time to assign it a rating.

lol @ this guy's rating system:

https://rateyourmusic.com/~Entracte7

― pomenitul

fwiw, RYM's aggregate rankings weight rankings of people who rate like that, in his case probably by multiplying them by zero.

Scaruffi's rating system isn't this extreme but there's a similar ethos here, I almost admire the dedication

also lmao at this guy because (as rusho just pointed out) the algorithm is designed specifically to ignore this dude

Apologies for assuming Entracte7 is a dude btw, it's just that anything else seems highly unlikely.

I wonder if he really listens to all of those half star albums he rates.

There's been a long history of frightfully serious young dudes ranking things in that fashion. (And yeah, almost invariably dudes.) Even a decade ago, before I ceased to be a moderator there. Everyone's trying to out-hate and out-avant-garde one another. Disdain is where it's at. That and the ongoing lack of consistency in the cataloguing of classical stuff were major reasons I drifted away. (Though I see that the latter is now much better accommodated.)

Adding new compositions to the database is still a serious time sink, which puts contemporary classical music at a disadvantage. I gave up almost as soon as I began.

people like that make me feel better about the fact that about 2/3rds of my ratings are 3.5 or higher

took me some time but I figured out that you really don't have to listen/rate/review stuff you know you're not gonna like

I learned this lesson by example... I knew a guy who would dutifully download & listen to 9-10 new albums per day, rate them all on RYM that night, and repeat, for years. Albums all seemed to just be random things culled from other RYM users & lists, ultra-obscure microgenres and niche stuff that he seemed to have no independent interest in or engagement with. I think he thought he was casting a wide net to discover new music but it was clearly a joyless compulsion & he never seemed to discover anything that exciting.

10 years later he doesnt do that anymore but, despite being a pretty smart guy, reliably has some of the most insanely WTF opinions on art of anyone I know - his years-long exercise in compulsive listening & rating just utterly fried his critical circuits.

Everyone's trying to out-hate and out-avant-garde one another

uggh it's like can they please find something else to pretend to care about besides music

that's so strange. every once in a while I'll do that, go grab 5-6 albums I'm vaguely interested in and listen to them all over a work day, but I wind up not really remembering anything about any of them

everyone with a rym account should be rounded up and put into camps

sorry lj

that's a real 1-star idea

band camps anyway

I think it's like the proverbial sausage making - the individual raters all look like complete idiots, but somehow the sum of these ratings is surprisingly useful.

that's so strange. every once in a while I'll do that, go grab 5-6 albums I'm vaguely interested in and listen to them all over a work day, but I wind up not really remembering anything about any of them

Guilty as charged. Well, sort of. I try to listen to each album at least twice, be it distractedly, before dishing out a rating. Unless I hate what I'm hearing from the get-go.

I’m afraid streaming has made me a very lazy and close-minded listener. In my younger days I’d often buy an album based on one song or even just a good review and give it several attentive listens regardless of whether I liked it at first or not. I’m not going to say I often went from a thumbs down to a thumbs up but it probably did at least encourage me to expand my tastes.

Yeah I really miss that about pre-digital days. The idea of listening to an album once, not liking it, and tossing it aside would have seemed just completely crazy to me. Maybe it was a function of being younger and less sure of my tastes or more insecure about my judgement, but I'd always spend time trying to figure out a way to live with stuff that I didn't like. It didnt happen a lot, but I can definitely name albums that I hated at first but eventually came around to loving, mostly because I kept them around and just ended up listening to them a bunch more.

Compared to now when dismissing albums or even entire artists based on hearing a song or two is something I probably do once a day.

just... you don’t have to rate it.. what the hell

When I first looked at RYM I noticed that all contemporary country albums had a bunch of half star reviews. Like, hmm, did you really listen to that 4th Montgomery Gentry album all the way through after hating the first 3 so much?

personally, I thought the first 13 U2 albums were garbage, but I'm gonna give #14 a shot

in case any of you haven't already seen it: https://twitter.com/Rateyrmusic

tbh I do listen to tons and tons of music, probably way too much, *and* I even ...rate... albums/singles when I listen to them, but I don't do this on RYM or elsewhere, I just have a spreadsheet I've been adding to for years which serves as a wantlist and also just to keep track of whether I've already listened to something. I mostly just do this during work hours. I generally don't continue to listen compulsively to all of an artists albums if I don't like them though. and my "ratings" are really how much I'd like to own that, it's not supposed to be some kind of objective score or anything. I am Satan.

i mean, that's totally cool. you're not satan. unless you want to be.

definitely Satan. yeah that post may sound more defensive than it's meant to be? just kind of empathising with the raters a bit while acknowledging that mass consumption of vast quantities of music is perhaps not the best way to do things, who knows how many things I've listened to and just wasn't in the mood right then and now I've "rated" it I'm not going to go back to it... argh now I need to relisten to thousands of albums just in case I got it wrong the first time j/k

nah its cool, it’s not even a big deal, it’s just weird when people bring up RYM rankings and stuff as if it means anything other than “how many people have heard of this album”

everyone with a rym account should be rounded up and put into camps

― bookmarkflaglink (jim in vancouver)

you're not the first person to suggest rounding me up and putting me in a camp

I learned this lesson by example... I knew a guy who would dutifully download & listen to 9-10 new albums per day, rate them all on RYM that night, and repeat, for years. Albums all seemed to just be random things culled from other RYM users & lists, ultra-obscure microgenres and niche stuff that he seemed to have no independent interest in or engagement with. I think he thought he was casting a wide net to discover new music but it was clearly a joyless compulsion & he never seemed to discover anything that exciting.

10 years later he doesnt do that anymore but, despite being a pretty smart guy, reliably has some of the most insanely WTF opinions on art of anyone I know - his years-long exercise in compulsive listening & rating just utterly fried his critical circuits.

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open)

you're talking about me, right? like, sure, not literally me, but i've done that, i've gone down the rym list rabbit hole, not on a fixed schedule but yeah i've binged.

i don't see it that way. yeah it was an addiction, an addiction that i never developed a tolerance to or got sick from. maybe the records i listen to aren't that exciting, maybe my enjoying david pritchard's "nocturnal earthworm stew" is evidence that my critical circuits are fried, but trust me i am anything but joyless. i enjoyed myself then, even though it was work, i am enjoying myself now.

i'm not doing that now, and i regret it. not too much, but i wish i had the time to immerse myself in that world, to get drunk off music.

I was disappointed to find my estimated number of albums per year is roughly 80. I give most things 6-12 listens. When certain circumstances change I might be able to do lots more albums.
I see a lot of book reading averages but I have no idea how many albums per year music fans listen to, but it's not very useful if lots of those albums weren't given a real chance.

Disdain is where it's at.

I've been looking for an opportunity to introduce the term "RYMoaner" to the lexicon but don't really look at that site enough to properly define the type.

I think it's like the proverbial sausage making - the individual raters all look like complete idiots, but somehow the sum of these ratings is surprisingly useful.
― Siegbran, vendredi 9 août 2019 20:21 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I feel it's the opposite for RYM. You can get around to the albums that appear in their charts through other means (publications etc), the jewels are all to be found on individual profiles and carefully crafted lists.
Completely agree about the random, joyless and disdainful impression I get from the rym "elitists". I don't want to be too harsh though, I did follow some of them for a while and it was still interesting.

I use RYM charts as a source for finding music from 1910s/1920s etc.

It's very useful before 1965, intermittently throws up good stuff until about 1990, just absolutely useless from then on.

This guy is good - https://rateyourmusic.com/list/bayard

One can amass a sizable quorum of "favorites" on RYM by simply scanning high ratings for more obscure albums one loves, checking that they've rated a sufficiently high threshold of releases with a sensible bell-curve of ratings, then then just ranking based on "friends".

Due to server/programming issues, ranking by "friends" was down for most of this year, and it cut back on my new music discoveries. It's now up, but still glacially slow, but I'd still take its output over most publications (save year end Quietus/Fact roundups).

Not RYM, but watching this Scaruffist adjust his ratings by .1 has a certain morbid fascination for me:
https://www.besteveralbums.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19621&start=130

I guess I shouldn't judge. I do sometimes go on RYM and adjust a rating by half a star. I feel like a fool, but I do it anyway.

To be clear with my story above, I wasnt trying to get down on people who do deep dive binges on RYM or anything like that. However you engage with music, if it brings you joy then more power to you. I was more relating it as the story of how I learned the lesson of: listen to music bc you want to, not bc you feel like you have to. I feel like RYM, with its data, cataloging, organization, and potentially-endless rabbitholes, had a seductive appeal to my friend and his personality type, but was a net negative for his emotional relationship with music - I think he ended up listening to music just in order to have something to rate & catalog rather than the other way around.

When I was a regular user, I got a lot of mileage out of the method sanpaku mentioned above, it was definitely my main way of finding out about new music in my wheelhouse and the hit-to-miss ratio was pretty reliable.