iTunes Rating Management
If you haven’t noticed already, I can be a bit anal when it comes to managing data. It comes from having a longer-term view of where I will use it in the future, and wanting to be careful about manipulating things which took a long time to build. My MP3 collection is a perfect example of something which I take great care in managing.
Somewhat recently, I took the time to re-rip all of my and my fiancé’s CDs at near-perfect quality (392Kbps/VBR). The 50% or so increase in size doesn’t bother me so much as I know disk is cheap. As I was ripping, I pulled all of the album cover art I could off of Amazon and kept them in each of the album directories. Each of the major collections are stored in their own macro-level directory (a big partition for mine, a big partition for hers, etc). I’ve just recently gone through using iTunes to consolidate artist and disc names amongst the larger collections, insert cover art into the actual MP3 files themselves, and set “My Rating” for a large number of songs.
The My Rating setting is an extremely useful variable which can be used to create dynamic playlists for listening to music I really like, and getting rid of music I don’t like off of my more limited laptop drive. With the idea that I will eventually be consolidating all the groups into one uber-collection accessible from any desktop machines I have, I’m trying to do this in a way which will be exportable in the future. Even though there is a lot of bitching on the Net about it, I think Apple’s decision to have iTune’s My Rating values be individual and not get encoded into the MP3 file itself was the right decision (since this music is going to be shared in our household).
For now I’m leaving each collection separated out. This will make it easier to replicate changes back to my home file server. Eventually I go ahead and import the files into the iTunes Library itself, but at that point I will consider them integrated into my local laptop’s music collection.
The biggest problem with this whole solution is exporting and re-importing the “My Rating” settings. It appears that while you can export a full XML file of all your iTunes songs — including ratings — importing that file back in to iTunes doesn’t actually bring the ratings back in (damn!). This means that whatever ratings I set on my laptop won’t be propagated to my desktop eventually (damn!). I’ve seen on Apple’s website that they do synchronization of ratings between iTunes and iPods, but I didn’t see if that also meant between computers. Such technology would be useful, and yet another reason I’d want an iPod, but it’s still never going to be big enough to hold everything I’m going to rate.
Apple really needs to make it possible to export and re-importing rating settings, based on the title and artist of the songs in your collection.
what makes you think the ratings get exported - Iklooked at the file and couldn’t see it
Then you are blind as each track that has a rating has “Rating” in the xml 0-100
I too am having this problem. I’m ditching my old computer and moving all my stuff to a new computer, but can’t seem to take my ratings with me. This is VERY annoying. The only way I can see around this, is to make a 5 star playlist, 4 star play list, etc; export the playlists, and then add the stars back using the playlists. Is there any other way?
I think if you just copy the .itx AND .xml file from one machine to the other, it will work. I just did this with success. The songs are all in the same directory structure as they were in the old system. These files, by default, are in your My Music\iTunes directory.