Rating to metadata

[lukeprog]

This is mostly a request to the developers of plugins like RateIt or Toaster (or any plugin developer). There are obviously many people who are against writing song ratings to the files themselves (in metadata), but I would love to be able to do this via Winamp's media library and playlist (or perhaps via a hotkey while a song is playing). The reason is that if you just rate it via the winamp media library, the rating is lost every time you move or rename your files. As such, it is useless for me to even bother ever rating my media this way. I would much rather rate my mp3s via the comment field or something.

Any thoughts? Does anyone have any interest in developing anything like this?

Before you write "develop it yourself, lazy bastard" please understand that I'm not a computer programmer, and that I'm very kindly asking if anyone is interested in developing something like this, not demanding it or complaining about it's inexistence.

[Veej007]

best bet:

write something rating:5 in the comment field

then, periodically, under "local media" type

?comment has "rating:5"

in the search box, highlight everything that comes up, right click, and choose rate items==>*****

this way you can restore your ratings easily every once in a while and keep then even when you move or rename items.

it's not ratings==>metadata, it's metadata==>ratings, but it's almost as good.

[lukeprog]

Right, well, my purpose was to write ratings to metadata quickly and easily from the Winamp Media Library - I can always use any program to write ratings that way to media files, it'd just be really slow :-)

But yeah, thanks the info anyway, I may end up doing that.

[shaneh]

I am finishing up a plugin which will allow proper importing/exporting of rating and probably playcount data to id3v2 tags. It is compatible with mexp's rating info and seems to work ok so far. It uses a proper POPM frame rather than some dodgy comment kludge.

It will of course only work with mp3s and id3v2 tags. I am still working on how to sync the ratings depending on whether theyve been updated, and trying to get the media library to update the tags automatically (ie when rating something using toaster etc, the tag is updated automatically as opposed to having to do an 'export to id3 tag' operation.)

Give me a few days to get a protoype done up.

[Veej007]

well i hope yours is smart enough to a) not overwrite everything that's already in the comment field and b) remove old ratings (ie take out the "rating:5" string when you change the rating to 4, instead of leaving you with both "rating:5" and "rating:4")

[shaneh]

It doesnt use the comment field, it uses the proper 'POPULARIMETER' frame. Similar to the 'Artist' and 'Genre' etc frames. So although it is actually possible to have more than one POPM frame, mine will edit just the one.

As I said, it does not touch the comment field, it will ignore the comment frame altogether. So of course it will not overwrite anything there.

If you rate something in the media library, then the POPM frame will not reflect that until you do an export. Unless I can find some way to intercept the updating of items in the media library.

[hollasch]

Have you had any luck with this plug-in? I'd certainly be interested. I wish more software (and hardware) supported the Popularimeter field of ID3v2 tags. It would be nice to be able to filter out the garbage when listening to large collections.

[shaneh]

Ive written a plugin called ml_id3rate or something, its in the dev forum. But Ive written a much more flexible version as part of ActiveWinamp, it requires id3com to be installed and registered. ActiveWinamp is available in the plugins page, the 2nd page of recently released plugins or something.

[psyker7]

im gunna ask here as well, but what is id3com? mb im being an idiot...