How to sync my mp3 Songs rating in iTunes across multiple Libraries

2009 November 24
by tobi

By now, I havn’t find any good solution to share my mp3 across multiple systems and disks. I’ve some on my local machine, some at work and some on my external harddisk to archive. Luckily, when copying my tracks to another library duplicates are ignored. But what annoys me most is that my ratings don’t get copied, as iTunes doesn’t store it within the file. Some while ago I found a solution by storing the number of stars into the ‘Grouping’ Field, so I can recover the rating afterwards. Now, I came up with this little applescript do automate the write and recover process. Just run this script, copy you mp3 to the other library, run the script again, and voilá, you ratings are back – nice!

(*  small apple script to save rating into grouping field and
   vice versa. Perfect to persitent store your rating witin the file
*)

tell application "iTunes"
	repeat with stars from 1 to 5
		set rating_value to stars * 20
		set group_name to "" & stars & " Stars"

		set sel to (every track whose rating is rating_value and grouping is "")
		repeat with aTrack in sel
			tell aTrack
				set grouping to group_name
			end tell
		end repeat

		set sel to (every track whose rating is 0 and grouping is group_name)
		repeat with aTrack in sel
			tell aTrack
				set rating to rating_value
			end tell
		end repeat
	end repeat
end tell

Btw. for each Star rating I do have a smart playlist which allows me to find those quickly.

7 Responses leave one →
  1. 2010 March 6

    I tried your method but applescript stops and gives me an error that it expected end of line but found an unknown token at the first semi-colon on the line:
    set group_name to “” & stars & ” Stars”

    Any thoughts on how to fix that or why I’m getting that error? Otherwise, this seems like a great way to deal with this problem, which has annoyed me forever. Thanks!

  2. 2010 March 6
    tobi permalink

    Hey David, ok this was an HTML encoding error, I fixed it. Use just the ampersand (&) instead of &

  3. 2010 March 7

    Thanks, worked perfectly. Great idea, I don’t know why no one had thought of this before.

  4. 2010 March 7

    Oops, it actually didn’t work. It times out with the following error message:

    error “iTunes got an error: AppleEvent timed out.” number -1712

    Any ideas?

  5. 2010 March 8
    tobi permalink

    hm strange, how many files does your itunes have?

  6. 2010 March 10

    About 30,000. A lot, in other words.

  7. 2010 March 11
    tobi permalink

    hm weird, I just ran the script on my machine again and it worked fine with approx 10k files.. maybe it’s just too much files which causes a memory issue? dunno–

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