PISSED OFF AT ITUNES!!! I lost my ratings forever!!! WAHHHH!!!!! :-( :-( :-(

[solrac]

This is not fair!!!!!
I can never listen to my music the same way again!!!!

POS iTunes screwed everything up!!

I have 5,130 songs.
All the songs were on my internal HD.
On my iPod I also had 5,130 songs. Perfect synch.

Then, I moved (with the finder), all my songs to my new 200 GB Firewire 800 drive.

Then, with iTunes, I reanalyzed the music directory (which I changed to point to the firewire HD.)

Now, I had 5,130 songs on the Firewire HD, but only 4,938 on the iPod!!

"Some songs were not copied to the iPod because they cannot be played on an iPod".

GRRR!!!! It can't be a problem with the MP3s... they are the same songs which worked fine before!

Well I figured it out... the songs in the library which could not be copied to the iPod were pointing to the wrong files! They wouldn't play in iTunes either! When I right clicked on an affected song, and selected "show song file", it pointed to some HTML page inside "iMovie help". All those songs pointed to weird help files!

So I said screw it... I deleted ALL the songs out of my iTunes library.

Then I dragged all the songs back into it iTunes with the Finder.

Everything rebuilt itself fine, and now my iPod is almost perfectly synched again! (Still 8 songs missing from the iPod.)

EVERYTHING BUT THE RATINGS!!!!

ALL THE RATINGS ARE GONE!!

MY FAVORITE SONGS PLAYLIST IS RUINED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What the hell???? The ratings information is only stored in the iTunes Music Library.xml file. They are NOT stored on the song, like any other ID3 tag. Even lyrics (not supported by iTunes) are stored in the song like ID3 tags!!

WHY WOULDN'T ITUNES SAVE THE RATINGS INFO INTO THE SONG???!!!!

NOW I LOST ALL MY RATINGS!!!! If I backed up all my music to another hard drive, and had to recover it all after a hard drive crash, MY RATINGS WOULD BE ERASED EVERY TIME!!!!!

This is so bad, Apple... so bad... :-( :-(

My old iPod still has all my ratings. How would I go about recovering them from there? Thanks for any help....

[Randman]

This isn't going to make you feel any better, but with such a large amount of songs, why didn't you manually manage your iPod? Especially when you're going to be moving songs around from your hard drive library. It basically keeps your iPod and ITunes' libraries separate, so if you change one, you don't change the other unless you go in and make the changes yourself. You can still add/delete songs, just that you have to drag and drop into your iPod list.
And there are some apps that allow you to pull songs from your iPod back to your Mac, even in aac format. If you have ratings on your iPod, you can try and pull songs over and see if the ratings carry over to your hard drive (I can't say, because I don't use ratings that much).
I'm at work now, but let me see if I can find the app, from VT, I'm using. In the demo mode, you can pull 10 songs at a time. The shareware cost less than US$10, but it let me pull nearly 2,000 songs in a matter of minutes (mp3, aac, audible.com stuff) over to my hard drive when I recently went from a gen 2 10 gig iPod to a gen 2 20-gig model.

[Randman]

Here's a couple to consider

http://ipoding.com/modules.php?op=mo...thread&order=0

http://www.versiontracker.com/mp/new...iPod&x=16&y=14

I believe this is what I have, but I'll have to confirm when I'm at home as I've only used the app once. If not, this one sounds pretty good. The second link is for VT, so you can see comments on it.

http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks/


http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17443

[buggerit]

Originally posted by solrac
What the hell???? The ratings information is only stored in the iTunes Music Library.xml file. They are NOT stored on the song, like any other ID3 tag. Even lyrics (not supported by iTunes) are stored in the song like ID3 tags!!

WHY WOULDN'T ITUNES SAVE THE RATINGS INFO INTO THE SONG???!!!!

Because none of the versions of ID3 tags support ratings, and thus apple have chosen to store them in the xml file. I can empathise with you though, i have twice lost all my playlists and ratings because "my itunes library has become corrupt". It made me start again. I now back up my itunes files every week or so to a cool little usb drive and Synchronise Pro.

[hulkaros]

Originally posted by solrac
....

Sorry because I cannot be of any help!

Sorry! I sympathize for this messed up situation...

[ksv]

I know you posted in the wrong forum intentionally just to get more attention

[Randman]

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16307

It's Pod Manager that I use. Among its features:

What's new in this version:

Improved detection of id3 tags
Improved performance
Fixed crashing bug

the id3 tags may be a solution for your headache.

[Darkshadow]

Won't work with the ratings, Randman. Like they've said, those aren't stored in the id3 tags.

solrac - take a look at your library.xml file in some text editor, see if the old ratings are still around or if iTunes totally rewrote the file. If the old ratings are still there, you can move 'em around. Will still be a pain in the butt, but it might not be as bad as going through all the songs in iTunes and re rating them. Most text editors let you move text around...and even if you use one that doesn't, copy & paste is still your friend.

If it completely overwrote the old one, the line to add would be <key>Rating</key><integer>100</integer>. 'Course, put your own rating there...since it goes to 100, I'd guess it goes in steps of 20 for the stars...so one star would be 20, two would be 40, three would be 60, four would be 80, and all five would be 100. I'm just guessing there, but I'm pretty sure that's the way it works.

If you're wondering why you lost the ratings doing that, it's because iTunes uses the path to the song files as a reference as well as the file's ID...moving them doesn't normally mess things up, as iTunes can track the ID, but moving them to a different hard drive is essentially a copy and gives the file a new ID...so you have a different file ID AND a different path, so iTunes guesses that the song is a new file. I don't think there's a heck of a lot the iTunes programmers could do about that as it's more of a hardware issue than a software one.