Yes, that’s right.

The short story is I got annoyed at the glacial pace of feature development over on Rate Your Music, Richey showed me a couple of Greasemonkey scripts he found to enhance the experience and this one popped up as being the most useful.  Except that I didn’t like a few things about it, so proceeded to simplify the options and add a small pile of new features.

So I present my enhanced version of the RYM enhancer script.  Features:

  • Changes ratings from 0.5-5 to 1-10*
  • Sets hover (title) text of star rating to a 1-10 scale*
  • Calculates average ratings for each artist and release category (album, single, video, etc.)*
  • Enhances ratings with colour (1-4 red; 4-7 yellow; 7-10 green)*
  • Highlights rated, owned or wishlist items in both custom charts and lists
    • Rated items are highlighted in blue, owned items in yellow, wishlist items are red.
    • Each type of highlight can be switched on or off depending on user preference.
    • If both owned and rated highlights are selected, owned items which have also been rated are highlighted in green.
    • If both wishlist and rated highlights are selected, wishlist items which have also been rated are highlighted in purple.
    • Calculates the total number of each different highlighted item type at the bottom of the page.  This is performed dynamically based on the highlighting preferences.

Starred items are features carried over from the original version of the script.  Highlight colours have been carefully chosen to allow readability, and also to provide a colour combination metaphor when rated & owned, or rated & wishlist, highlights are selected.  You can’t own an item and have it on your wishlist, so there is no combination highlight for that.

There are certain circumstances where releases that you have rated will not be highlighted.  This is because RYM allows you to rate multiple versions of any given release, but doesn’t provide a user friendly way to manage these ratings with respect to the release as a whole.  So if you have rated a release version which is different to that displayed in a list or chart, that album’s entry will not show up as having been rated.  Most annoyingly, this also happens when looking at artist pages; the way I currently get around it is to rate multiple versions of the same album, which achieves the desired results but can be annoying as you are rating the same release multiple times.  I might see if I can provide a better fix to this issue with an extension to the script.

Needless to say, this requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.  Go get it :)

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