One really cool feature of Songbird, my music player of choice, is the ability to save song rating directly to the MP3, i.e. the ID3 tag. Rating isn't an ID3 field that gets saved to the .mp3 file itself, like artist, album, etc, so every MP3 generally has it's own proprietary system that saves these ratings to an external database. This causes two problems...
1. MP3 ratings aren't interchangable.
2. Moving your MP3's on your hard drive or to a different computer without using the program or backing up this database loses as the ratings.
While the Songbird solution doesn't solve the first issue, i.e. your Songbird ratings aren't immediately imported into, say iTunes, there is a way to save the rating directly to the file, allowing you to move them around at will, etc. I'm manicuring my library so I can say "create me a playlist with these genres and songs I've rated at 4 and above", so I want to make sure that if I go to the trouble of rating songs, that they don't get lost in the future.
Anyway, to enable this functionality, open a new tab in Songbird, and type
about:config
in the address bar. Then in the filter box, type
songbird.metadata.ratings
which should filter out all options except
songbird.metadata.ratings.enableWriting
Click on the value of this setting from 'false' to 'true'. Now, every time you rate a song, it will write you rating to the track itself. To test this, you can rate a song, then delete it from you library and reimport it, and notice your rating is still there.
b.
2 comments:
it's funny you say that, since I came across this website while googling for a solution to songbirds lousy mp3 rating support.
While Mediamonkey, itunes and vista all support an apparently standard rating system which I used for years in both itunes and mediamonkey, songbird doesn't support it, and I can't find a way to import my ratings.
Mediamonkey crashed on me and I can't reinstall it properly for some reason. iTunes just doesn't have the advanced features. so songbird was my last hope. but the rating thing is really, really annoying.
Thanks a lot, dude. That is the exact solution I needed to my playlists to endure a change of hard disk or adding new tracks.
If I already thought Mozilla Songbird was pretty amazing, now there's anything I need from this incredible media player.
Again, thanks a lot.
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