Easily Import Song Ratings to iTunes
Updated
A few years ago I was given an iPod. Like many, I loaded all of my songs into iTunes and used it as my primary music player. At some point iTunes stopped working and nothing I did would get it working again.
At that point, I switched to an alternate music player, JRiver’s MediaCenter. While this software served my purpose, I recently had a need to move back to iTunes. The only challenge for me was how to move my song ratings into iTunes. No big deal you say? Well, for me, song ratings are the key to all of my playlists (a subject of another post). If I had to start from scratch, rating my 5000+ song library, I would be working straight through the new year.
My initial thought was to do it with some software. However, thinking about it some more, I came away with a better solution – playlists.
The idea I have is to create playlists based on song ratings inside of MediaCenter. These are “Smart Lists”
that automatically update as songs are rated. MediaCenter allows you to export these playlists into various formats. One of them M3U is supported by iTunes. Here is what I did:
- Imported all of my songs into iTunes. This took some time.
- Created the following playlists in JRiver MediaCenter
- 1 Star
- 2 Star
- 3 Star
- 4 Star
- Exported each playlists as an M3U file
- Start iTunes
- Select File->Import and open the playlists you just saved. When you do, iTunes will
import the playlist and display it under the iTunes playlists. - Click the newly created playlist
- Highlight all of the songs in the playlist
- Right mouse click over the songs and rate them
- Repeat the import process for each of your playlists
Since iTunes can import M3U files, migrating your song ratings will work with any other player that also support M3U playlists. Most do.
There are a couple of caveats to this tutorial which are rooted in the M3U file format. The M3U file stores both the filename and the path to the file. There are two (at least) potential problems.
- If you want to move from Windows to OSX
- If your music file locations have changed
If you have either of these problems then a little Script-Fu should do the trick. It wouldn’t be too hard to write a quick parser in Perl/Python/Ruby which changes the path and filename to the new locations.
Technorati Tags: iTunes, iPod, Productivity, Tips
I tried this but it made duplicates of the songs and then the originals were ‘file not found’ I’ve tried it a couple of times. I did a drag and drop to put the original files into iTunes.
Interesting, I just verified this and everything works.
One possibility is the file paths in the M3U file don’t match up to the paths of the files that were dragged into iTunes.
For example, I have a drive dedicated to music. All of my music lives in M:\path\to\my\tunes. If I look at the M3U file, the path is correct. If I look at a particular song in the Get Info view of iTunes, the path is also correct.
Are you doing this on Windows or a Mac?
I successfully imported my ratings from Windows Media Player (on a Windows box) to iTunes (on a Mac). The only hitch I had was the relative pathnames that were encoded in the .m3u file. I just did a search and replace on “..”, and replaced it with the absolute path. For good measure, I also converted the backslashes to forward slashes and removed the CR’s.
Step 1 must be completed before step 5, or else it’ll just create a playlist with only the songs in it’s library.
Thanks for the post.
Rob,
Glad it worked for you, thanks for the update.
Thank you so much for this tutorial – it’s helped me on numerous occasions!
This is really helpful, but how do you deal with the filenames being different? I need to import my music library from Windows Media Player on a PC to iTunes on a Mac. I have tried your steps and it works to a point but as iTunes uses a different naming format a quick search and replace on the path doesn’t do the job. Any thoughts gratefully appreciated.
Totally brilliant. Thanks!
Worked perfectly (Windows Media Player 11 to iTunes)!
This works like a charm….brilliant. Thanks
Why Apple does not provide this kind of assistance is beyond my ken. I have delayed buying an IPod for years because of this one issue.
Thanks again
Thanks a lot!
It saved me from rerating over 2000 files.
We suffer over at ours from loads of traffic but very few commenters apart from our own group. Maybe this will help them? Love the blog.
Top man, Very Clever but simple idea, thanks!
So glad I found this posting – as fad3d said above, this saved me hours by not having to re-rate my ITunes library after I moved it to a new drive. And my ratings are a key aspect of my IPod usage.
Neat idea. You might want to export your ?star playlists to .txt though, if the filenames are different
Glad this helped you.
4 years later and this is still awesome. Needed to import from linux (Amarok) to itunes.
Quick seach and replace in the m3u files for “/” and replace with “\”
Then search and replace the relative path .\[some folders]\your music.mp3 to [drive letter]\some folders\your music.mp3
and Bob’s your uncle!
Thanks!