Have you ever been frustrated by losing your prescious iTunes ratings by reformat, crash, accident or some other unintended happening? Well I have too – a few times. It is like going through a major trauma: Denial – this can’t be happening, my ratings must be here somewhere! Anger – why did this happen? Why isn’t there anything done to prevent this! Bargaining – phone a friend to find out if there is ANYTHING to be done, you’ll pay good money (food/beer/tickets) if s/he can just recover your ratings! Depression when you realise it is really gone, months of diligently rating each song you listen to…. 
Then finally acceptance: yup they’re gone, I’m going to have to do it all over again OR just plain deciding, screw ratings, who needs them? Well believe it or not, you do! Before long you will be ratings songs again, creating smart playlists and carrying on in your old ways.
Being prepared for this kind of disaster is the best way to deal with it. So I decided to write a little application that will help me to prevent this happening again. It is called RatingStar and it is freeware – yes its free, gratis! It allows you to backup your iTunes rating to an external text file or to each music file’s comments tag. The exported file can be opened in a spreadsheet application like Excel and edited giving you more control.
Being once (actually multiply) bitten, I’m now paranoid, so now I backup my song ratings to an external file AND to each music file’s comments tag. I store my backup ratings file in multiple locations: flash drive, external hard drive and I mail myself a copy to my web email account, ready for the day when disaster strikes again.
I’m already thinking about ways to improve the application. I’m thinking about thinks like storing play-counts, last played and skip-counts. All these things that can be used to create smart playlists. Which makes me think of creating an auto-rating function too. What about backing up Windows Media Player ratings. Maybe even transfer ratings between WMP & iTunes (but then there’s MucicBridge already). Anyway, just the ratings is good enough for me now!
You can download the application from the downloads section at tomfusion.com.