The concept of "Bonus Track" & "Bonus CD"

[Morbeas]

So I'm going through a process of updating some albums in my collection, in that I'm looking to see if there are any "Remastered" versions out there that are sonically superior than what I currently have in my library. As you probably know, a lot of remastered releases also contain bonus songs or in some cases whole bonus CDs. Well, in terms of album score, this represents a problem. Just imagine for a minute that there's an album which contains 10 tracks upon initial release. In your opinion, this album is a "classic", most tracks rated an 8 or better, giving the album a "muso score" of 8.70. Now imagine that 15 years later, the artist releases a "remastered" version of the same album which also contains 5 "bonus" tracks. As you can now imagine, rating those 5 bonus tracks (which, in most cases are "outtakes" and "demos" etc) will most likely negatively impact the album's score, reducing it.

To remedy this, I'm proposing to implement the concept of "Bonus Track" and "Bonus CD". With this, you're able to tag certain tracks (or even whole CDs if you like) as "bonus material" and thus exclude their ratings from affecting the overall album score. Would this be feasible?

Thanks.

[musoware]

It would, and it's a good idea - the field in Muso could be maintained there after import or (more likely) fed by a custom tag. The same applies to some albums I have where "applause" is included as a track on it's own. For any such tagged track it could simply suppress the rating from being displayed on the album/artist/nowplaying page.

Anyone else like to chip in with an opinion?

[Morbeas]

Yeah, I was thinking for Orbis comments, we can use something like "BONUS" as the tag, flagging it with a 1 to set it.

I think it shouldn't stop it from being displayed at all, just not counting those ratings in the calculation for album score. Everything happens in the background.

[musoware]

Yeah, I was thinking for Orbis comments, we can use something like "BONUS" as the tag, flagging it with a 1 to set it.

I think it shouldn't stop it from being displayed at all, just not counting those ratings in the calculation for album score. Everything happens in the background.

Well if we do show the rating I'd prefer to show it in a different way to give a hint that it's so flagged, and excluded from the album score - blue stars or something.

[Morbeas]

Ok, that sounds good!

Red stars maybe? It'd be subtle.

[Morbeas]

Any word on this? Have you decided which tag (maybe user configurable?) you're going to use to denote a track as bonus? I've already started tagging all my new albums with the BONUS tag with a value of 1!

[musoware]

Well it will be user-configurable via the custom-tag mechanism, so it doesn't matter.

Yes I intend to do this, but haven't got round to it yet.

[musoware]

It's almost done. Just got to do some system testing. It's a useful enhancement I think.

One thing though, I agree a bonus track unrated or rated lowly shouldn't down-grade an album's score, but what if a remaster of an album has one or two bonus tracks that actually enhances it? The option always exists to not mark that track as a bonus track, so it does receive the extra credit if you rate those tracks highly, and I think this is good enough because it's totally under the user's control, but what do you all think?

[Morbeas]

As long as it's the choice of the user, it's perfectly acceptable. Can't wait!

[Morbeas]

Woohooo, this is in the new build! Thanks much!