Q: dynamic playlist of unrated songs

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:47:20 +1000, Seb Ruiz <ruiz at kde.org> wrote:
> 2009/6/29 Ian Monroe <ian.monroe at gmail.com>:
>> 2009/6/28 Ben K <mrmrpotatohead at gmail.com>:
>>> Actually the last time I looked at the source, an unrated song IS the
>>> same
>>> as a zero rating. The DB stores unrated songs' rating as zero, but it
>>> should
>>> probably be null. If people are happy for this to change I'll see if I
>>> can
>>> write a patch tonight.

This issue has been brought up before.  There's some debate whether "zero"
should be considered a rating or not.  This doesn't have to do with whether
you can distinguish between them in the database/source code, but rather
whether intuitively this makes any sense).

The argument for is that if you look at it like a point system, you're
assigning zero points to the song.

The argument against is that conceptually many people consider zero as
"nothing" -- it may not be null in the database, but it's null in C and an
alias for a boolean false -- so that it makes sense that this is "no
rating".

I lean more towards the latter -- after all, if you have no stars assigned
to a song, I think intuitively it makes sense that there's no rating at
all, whereas assigning half a star out of five means it's a real stinker. 
Otherwise you have to not only distinguish between zero stars and "not
rated" but have to somehow make it obvious to the user that it's not the
same thing.  (iTunes and Windows Media Player behave the same way IIRC,
probably for the same reason.)

--Jeff