This is a selector i made for a custom randomizer.

I also usually listen to whole albums at a time and usually alone with headphones.

If i select artists then rating counts for artists. If not then it counts for either album/track. The next “item” to play is either a full album or a single track. The rating can be set dynamically. Shift 4 means rating 4 and up. Ctrl 3 means 3 and down. Shift 3 ctrl 4 means rating 3-4 only. I rarely do that but its possible.

The hearth simply filters only favourites items or not. Either tracks or albums. Artists dont have a favourite tag.

If thats confusing yeah i see why, but i understand it and i am the only person for whom it needs to work.

My rating system

In general.

4 stars is my gold standard for “very good music” but not just for me personally but also i would recommend and play this music for others.

5 stars are basically same as 4 stars but my absolute favourites among them.

3 stars are song i do like but are a bit more situational and would often get skipped.

1-2 are songs i never want to play automatically. But not perse cause i don't like em. 2 is most often used for songs i don’t connect to. But 1 is mostly used as a non rating that is exclude from “not judged”

Mostly notably i have song with only 1 star rating that are favorited.

Favourited tracks mean i personally connect to the music on an emotional level. It does not matter how good the song technically is. If

The above image will play a random favorited album of an artist which i gave 4-5 stars.

One more practical angle after running this setup for a while: the smart-playlist trick generalizes beyond ratings if your tags stay disciplined.

What actually made it work for me on Navidrome + Feishin:

• Keep mood/occasion as single-value tags (one field, comma-free). Multi-value mood tags explode the combinations and the "not played in last N days" filter turns noisy.
• Same idea as above for ratings (rating is not 1), but inverted for a discovery build: rating is empty + play count is 0 gives a "never touched" queue that surfaces imports you forgot about.
• Subsonic clients cache the queue aggressively; if a smart playlist looks stale, force a library scan in Navidrome and restart the client before blaming your rules.
• If you batch-tag with beets or Picard: beets can write ratings via plugins, but Picard's default tagging won't touch ratings at all — Navidrome only reads the POPM field it expects, so "stars vanished after retagging" is almost always the tagger, not Navidrome.

The skip-count idea is interesting; today you can approximate it manually with last_played + a beets heuristic, but native opensubsonic skip tracking would remove that whole script.

This puts me in mind of the smart playlists I built in iTunes. Several playlists of 3/4/5* tunes, plus a few other rules to bring lesser played tunes to the surface. These all fed in to one bigger 50 track playlist that would pick something like 30% of its tracks from 5*, 25% from 4*, 20% from 3*, then make up the rest with the other stuff. Oh, and it would filter out any track that wasn't 5* that had been played in the last two weeks.

Then, when I was rocking my iPod, if I was digging something that wasn't rated, I could spin up a rating and it'd get shifted to the corresponding list ready to drop into the pool for future enjoyment.

It was properly great.

I guess you can still do it with Apple Music, but it's not as much fun when your library is thousands of songs you added and never listened to again.

Anyway, I'm going to see if I can recreate it with Navidrome. I've got 14k tracks in there and a willingness to listen to them all.

I use Symfonium to do the same thing.

My rating system is a bit loosey goosey because its hard and tedious to catagorise music into more that 5 levels. Its mostly defined by how much/often I would listen to a song because that seems like a good base line.

Songs sonetimes get upgraded / downgraded on the fly and then siphon in / out to the respective playlists.

• 5 star: high energy, 99% wont skip, will listen to hundreds of times again
• 4 star: any energy just a good song, will listen to many times again
• 3 star: indifferent, might be a hit on the right day in the right mood, wouldnt listen to more than once a week
• 2 star: not for me, can understand why others might like it, wont make it in to any of my playlists
• 1 star: absolutely fucking not, mark for deletion (hyper commercial pop like the overplayed shit through the 2010s mostly fills this category)

Other Navidrome/opensubsonic users, how do you guys use the 5 stars? for me it is

People often ask me 'What's your favorite song?' or 'Who is your favorite guitarist?' to which I reply 'All of them.' I've been playing, creating, and listening to music since the age of 5 when my uncle showed me 3 simple cords. It lit a fire in me that is burning to this day. I do have genre specific playlists, but a lot of times I just put the whole lot on random/no repeat and enjoy Opera one minute and Heavy Metal the next, with some Blues, Jazz, Soul, R&B, Funk, Hip Hop, Rap, Rock, thrown in the mix. I truly love music and my tastes are quite expansive and eclectic. There are some songs that do have deep meaning to me tho. However, if I were to utilize the 5 star system, they would all be 5 stars. LOL Recently, I managed to have a script pick a random song from a playlist, and display it in the Linux MOTD, to remind me of songs I may not have heard in a while, when I administer the server.

I don't use the ratings, but I'll "heart" songs I like.

I scrobble my playing from navidrome using listenbrainz and tell my two clients Tempus and Feishin to use the scrobbled data to build dynamic playlists. If I start with a particular song or album, the mix following that is usually kept in the same mood, only strays into weird stuff once in a while, but no more that YouTube Music used to.

I use a combo of navidrome and feishin too, and i am also very very happy.

I tried out all the web players i could find and found feishin to be the best, mostly for it's ability to multi select stuff in the queue easily and carry out various operations.

I'm really happy with this setup too, i don't use all that funky playlist stuff but it does sound cool and i should have a play. I never got into the spotify way of music so i never really was looking to replace that way. I only really listen to full albums (apart from dance music when i prefer dj created sets/mixes or occasionally playlists by genre). I do make sure i have my genre tag setup right so i can browse by genre as i generally know which genre i want (genres correlate with moods for me) if not exactly which album/band i want to listen to. Only expection to all this is i have a self created genre called Friday Music which is just quite high energy across genre 'yeeaaa work is basically done' music. And if i don't know what to listen to i go for a little silence cos i sure do listen to a lot of music :)

I keep a playlist of albums which are 'to listen to' when it occurs to me i should listen to X again but won't right at that moment, then i build my actual queue from there for the day, but i have noticed feishin has started saving your queue which is really cool, still i don't like my queue too full and there are generally 10 albums or so on my to listen to list, so i'll probably keep this playlist separate.

I have been trying to get into favoriting tracks but i've only managed a few so far and it's not really taken off for me.

How do you create a custom station?

Star ratings and smart playlists! Oh my! I love this stuff. Im currently using plex, which allows for half stars since im a masochist

I dont know that I need the full ten options, but 5 wasn't quite enough for me. If there was like 7 star system id do that, hah.

• 0.5 - I would delete if other people weren't listening to the library. Never play again
• 1 - on my shitlist. Unless something changes, will probably go to 0.5 stars the next time I hear it.
• 1.5 to 2 - Not opposed, but forgettable or slightly not my style
• 2.5 - average content. Not memorable but fine
• 3 - solid content, still not memorable
• 3.5 - the good stuff. I'll put it on a solo car ride and generally not skip
• 4 - Amazing songs. If I was to put a Playlist on for other people and not worry about it
• 4.5 - Favorite songs. Maybe a fault or two but will still stay with me for a lifetime
• 5 - Id play these for anyone without hesitation and then look at them and say "was that not perfection?!"

For smart playlists:

• playlists by star rating
  • alts for excluding facemelting stuff to play in public
• Car ride - 3.5 stars and up + havent heard in a month
• "Frontier" playlist. Only play things i havent heard in a year that aren't 0.5 stars

I generally listen to my frontier Playlist and try to rate as I go. Other playlists for when im listening but busy and just want the good stuff.

I havent found a good way to tag on the go, unfortunately. Maybe someday

I tried Navidrome as well as Jellyfin, but I just struggled with the bare minimum QoL enhancements that I've been spoiled by, like being able to have playlists and liked songs and also be able to download and see all of that on my phone while offline. It may have just been the (android) client apps I was trying, but please someone prove me wrong.

Honestly, I would probably be better off just buying a cheap generic mp3 player with a microSD card slot.

everytime

Not a word yet. It may never be a word.

Thanks for mentioning all the software you use. I just started filling up my library for navidrome and haven't gotten to plugins yet. Spindle looks very good.

Ratings wouldn't work for me, because I listen to completely different music at different times of the day. I can't stand loud, aggressive music in the morning so I listen to Jazz/Soul/Instrumental Hip Hop beats/Classic Piano. At noon I would be bored by the music I listen to in the morning, time for Hardcore/Punk/Japanese Metal/Hyperpop/DnB/anything goes. A noon song would receive 1 star in the morning and vise versa.