My previous media player had the ability to rate songs with half-star increments, which I enjoyed. I've been browsing my different options for music players, and I like Banshee, but the one feature I would really like to see is half stars.

I went ahead and pulled git master and made the GUI changes, but to my dismay when I looked in the database the ratings are being stored as integers from 1-5. That doesn't leave any clear upgrade path to half star increments.

I thought about some different upgrade options, and the one that makes the most sense to me is a remap to the range 0-100. This would mean the valid options for ratings would become -1 for undefined, 0, 10 (1/2 star), 20 (1 star), 30 (1 1/2 star) etc. The convenient feature about this mapping is that there are no collisions with the previous ratings, so we can determine unambiguously whether or not the songs have been converted.

The hardest part I foresee about this change is ensuring that all ratings references are converted (smart playlists etc). A cursory glance over the source found a few places that ratings are hard-coded. (Built in playlists, and ipod syncing)

I was hoping that this change would be much simpler, and that there would already be intermediate values that I could use for the new ratings. Since this is turning out to be a higher impact change than I expected, I want to get some opinions from the developers and maintainers before I go any further.

Is this a change that the maintainers don't want or will reject?
What other implications of this change am I missing?
Would another ratings scheme be more useful?

Regards
Adam Mills