Rating Writer - Permanent ratings, easy transfer, just the way it should be!

Rating Writer is a small utility for iTunes 4 and Mac OS X that allows the user to write their current song ratings to the song's ID3 tag (in the comments field) and then later restore the ratings to a different iTunes library.

What's It Good For?

Transfer Between Your Computers
Transfer specific songs from one of your computers to another (e.g. desktop to laptop) without using the same library on both computers. Remember, if you have more songs on your desktop's hard drive than you want (or will fit) on your laptop's hard drive, you cannot use the same library and you have to reenter all of your star ratings.

Transfer Between Users
Transfer specific songs from one user to another on the same computer. If you only want a few songs on one of your other users, you can just use Rating Writer on those specific songs then restore the ratings on the other user! Normally you would have to use the same iTunes library (impossible if you don't copy all the songs) or you would have to re-rate all of the music on the other user.

Permanent (or Double) Rating Backups
You may not know this but if your iTunes library gets corrupted (and believe me, it easily can) you will lose ALL of your ratings! Unless you backup your iTunes library daily, you can risk loosing all of your ratings. Rating Writer permanently writes the rating to the comments field in the songs ID3 (data) tag. Therefore, if you lose your entire library, you can just restore all of your ratings from the ID3 tag using Rating Writer!

FAQ & Company Info

Software Notes, Known Issues, Questions...
• This script will be somewhat slow on huge selections of songs because it has to update each individual song's ID3 tag. I will be adding a progress bar in the near future so be patient. In the meantime, you may want to try writing less songs at a time to see how fast it will be on your machine.

• I would encourage you to backup your iTunes library before running this, or any scripts, just to ensure there are no problems.

• If you have any questions, comments, or other known issues, please feel free to contact me at ratingwriter@midwestdjs.com.

Contact Information
This software was developed by Cornelius Qualley of Thunder & Lightning, Inc. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact me any time at ratingwriter@midwestdjs.com. You can visit Thunder & Lightning's website at any of the following websites.