I have an mp3 music collection of about 8,300 songs. I have almost all of them tagged with the basics (title, artist, album, track, and genre) and many with album art and year. Other information is sometimes included and for a few, I also have lyrics and album review metadata added.
I began my collection many years ago using MusicMatch until they destroyed that fine app. I now use WinAmp pro to play, rip, organize, and tag my music. I began just recently rating my songs with WinAmp and then discovered by accident (and to my horror) that WinAmp does not store this rating value in the songs metadata, but in a separate WinAmp-only file. This does not suit, as I want to be able to migrate my music to any player in the future and have all of the song information already present. I dont want to be chained to a specific application.
During my research, one source suggested that MediaMonkey (MM ver 3) and WMP both embedded the rating data. I installed MM in a virtual environment (
www.sandboxie.com) and found that it will indeed import (in batch mode) the rating information from WinAmp, and apparently embed that information into the file metadata. I examined some of the music files (copies in the virtual box) thus imported and the Date Modified has been changed and the ratings show up correctly in MM as I made them in WinAmp, but I cant verify that the ratings values exist with other MP3 applications. For example, WMP doesnt see the ratings at all. It indicated that the songs had not been rated yet.
1. Does the song rating metadata have a defined spot in the file for storage and retrieval for id3 or does it differ by the application in question? (WMP vs. MM, e.g.) Im sensing that this is not a standard tag field. True?
2. MM has its own idiosyncrasies, and Id be inclined to otherwise stay with WinAmp; Im thinking that I can just use MM to export the WinAmp-created ratings to the song tags every so often. What do you think of this idea? Is it risky? I like that MM will import tag info from WinAmp but Im concerned there may be damage or overwritten exiting metadata by MM, especially if this is non-standard. Or, it wont be able to be read by other mp3 apps.
3. Any advice? Do you have any experience with MM, thoughts on my solution, or have better ideas for rating my songs and storing that data in the tag area?
System:
Windows XP, SP3, current on all patches.
Dell XPS 630i, 6mb, 3.16 Ghz, 1,333 FSB, Intel Core 2 E8500, Dual Core 6mb Cache;
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at RAM; 800MHz - 4 DIMMs memory
