This is really a 2 part post: a request for advice on ratings import, and a suggestion for future ratings enhancement in roon. I separated these to reduce complexity.
Topic 2: The rating concept in roon. There has been a large volume of comments, many justified IMO. A good rating system should support multiple ratings of a single item. currently it appears (I’m new to roon, so correct my mis-statements) roon has only a single rating for an album, initially partially populated from critics ratings. users can override these ratings, but not in a bulk operation, and the information on whether the rating is a user rating or critic rating is lost.
use case (ok, a software architect would tell me this isn’t a use case, as it has too much implementation): user views ratings of an album as an extensible vector. Initial components are critic ratings and user ratings (user ratings default to zero). If my system has multiple profiles, users can choose to export their ratings to other profiles (so for example, if my son is an expert on blues, and I’m a jazz guy, we can share our genre knowledge of good albums). The rating vector would then include this new dimension. My user ratings could be imported, from ROONALBUMTAG, a simple list of albums and ratings that I would create, or some better idea. The rating vector could be sorted by any column by the user.
Not saying this is an optimal answer, just outlining one possibility for improving a feature that seems to have generated a lot of comment, confusion, and dissatisfaction…