Dear MCS:
I’d been using winamp for years upon years, and it’s been great. I just recently found out that if you move your music collect from folder X to folder Y, you lose all your ratings information, and you will never get it back. So, I tried Media Monkey, which according to my google-fu is the only mp3 player that stores the ratings in the file itself, and not in some arbitrary xml file that get deleted everytime you sneeze.
However, I’m having trouble using MM, as it likes to just max out my cpu at 100%, and the music starts to stutter like a mother fucker. THIS is annoying to say the least. So, a litte more google-fu and everyone is raving about foobar2000. only problem? no support for file ratings afaik.
So tell me. How can I have a mp3 collection of over 40 gigs, and have the ratings in the files? Is it really so much to ask? And please, no itunes, that shit is satan.
Also, I’d love to be able to sync the songs that are top rated / top played to a usb drive, so I can play them in my truck.
I don’t even rate my music. I just let it play in shuffle and random. If I want a certain music genre or artist I’ll just type it in the search box of Winamp.
If there are tracks that have a low rating for you, which is apparently what’s so important for you, why keep them at all?
Not trying to be an ass, just asking.
I rate my music, but then again I have a “sophisticated” rating system that goes beyond the typical use of ratings…
5 stars = top priority to listen to
4 = I’ve listened to it extensively and I enjoyed it
3 stars = haven’t listened extensively and rated it yet
2 = I’ve listened to it extensively and I didn’t enjoy it
1 star = NA
0 stars = nonmusical, or some kind of miscellaneous collection in which it wouldn’t make sense to rate the songs as one collective entity
Yeah, weird…
Anyways, I don’t use anything to encode the ratings as part of the files.
That’s why I had to start over again when my iTunes arbitrarily decided to erase my files from the library…
[/no one cares]
@Dreth
all of my music I want to listen to is in my collection. but there’s certain songs that I would love love love to just listen to time after time after time. Those are rated 5. Then there’s songs that I’m just not wanting to hear all the time, but I do like. Those are rating 3. For me there’s ratings all between those, but anything less then 3 gets a shit can treatment.
so for driving purposes, I only want rated 5 songs, right?
Understood. In my case if I play a good song one too many times, it becomes average. That’s why ratings are not cut out for me. And my collection’s considerably small compared to others, it’s around 1500 MP3’s.
Yeah…I’ve got 22,929 MP3’s (really AAC’s) so rating helps to organize and prioritize…
@yawn
DAMN! you win… I only have about 17,260 mp3s, lol.
Almost all of mine are metal and hard rock.
@hvymetal86
Heh, guess I shouldn’t mention the additional 3,957 mp3s in my miscellaneous non-iTunes folder. ^_^
Anyways, as for genre, since I took the time to organize ’em, I might as well share:
50s/60s/70s = 723
Alternative = 2388
Folk/Country/Blues-rock/Jam (includes blues) = 615
Anime (don’t watch, do listen) = 545
Classical guitar = 64
Com/prac: Chamber (classical) = 58
Com/prac: Orchestral (classical) = 420
Com/prac: Solo (classical) = 237
Com/prac: Vocal (classical) = 172
Contemporary classical = 298
Darkwave/Medieval = 247
Electronic = 497
Film score = 2252
Hip hop = 786
Indian (classical and popular) = 656
Indie/Post-punk = 397
J-Pop (yeah…) = 1003
J-Rock = 799
Jazz/fusion (that is, jazz *and* fusion) = 559
Latin (includes tango, fado, etc) = 284
Metal = 688
Musical = 319
Opera = 618
“Other” = 971
Post-rock = 99
Power pop/-punk = 594
Progressive = 327
Punk/Ska/Reggae = 276
R&B/Soul/Funk = 188
Regional (popular music from non-Anglo countries) = 889
World (traditional music from non-Anglo countries) = 551
Hopefully you can decipher some of the abbreviations and musicologist jargon… As for the bizarre genre combos, that’s just how I saw most effective to organize my library. ^_^
Anyways, that was a wonderful way to waste 7 minutes. =/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id3_tag
hope its helpful.
This is what I do, and it works great for me.
As irkusk mentioned, mp3s have metadata attached to them. One of the fields available is “comment”. I don’t know about WinAmp, but iTunes allows you to search, filter, and modify comments of each of your files.
The comment of one of my mp3s would look something like this:
energetic, montage, 4
where “energetic” and “montage” are my personal tags for the file, and 4 is my personal rating.
I then set up smart playlists that contain only files with certain tags in the comments section. This way, I can transfer my whole collection of songs, search by comment:4, add a star rating of 4 for those files, and I’m done recovering my star rating. Smart playlists are transferrable, but even if they weren’t, they only take a few seconds to create from scratch.
If WinAmp has a way to bulk modify, filter, and search the comments field, this will work for you, too!
Yeah, you can have Smart Playlists organize by comment/grouping/whatever. Just see which tags are actually part of the file, and use those.
I use a combination of Winamp and MediaMonkey for my music – MediaMonkey tags the album art and rating into the mp3 and is great for bulk renaming of the file, but I prefer to use Winamp to actually play the song. You just have to watch out, since when you mess with the tag in MediaMonkey, the year and comment tag is screwed up (no matter what you’re editing) in Winamp.
Tiki: What you seek is doable in Foobar. The easiest way I know of doing it is to download the Quick Tagger plugin, which lets you set tags to predefined values from the right click menu. Then you just set up a tag called Rating, and set it’s values to 1,2,3,4,5 or A,B,C,D or whatever, then you can easily rate the songs, and though I haven’t fiddled with it much, it’s apparently pretty simple to set up playlists based on tag values.
foobar has plugins?
where? the official site was hiding them from me last time I was there
Try MP3Toys. I like it a lot!
www.mp3toys.net/
Can’t you just not move your files?
WMP10, Playlist, “favs”
Who uses the rating system anyways? :\
Plus it comes with windows…