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[greynolds]

I've got a couple of conversions setup under the "Drives & Devices" section, configured under Options -> Handheld to convert my music files for use on other devices, including my iPhone / iPad (so for iTunes) and my car.  The one I use to feed iTunes is configured to convert the music to Apple Lossless and the other one for the car is configured to convert to MP3.

When I run the conversion to MP3, the star ratings I've given my music files in JRiver show up in the converted MP3 files.  When I run the conversion to Apple Lossless, the star ratings are reset to no rating assigned.  As far as I can tell, there isn't any setting in JRiver that controls whether the star ratings are included or not.

Is this functioning as designed and if so why?

I'm currently using 24.0.19, but don't recall seeing anything in the recent updates related to this.

[Yaobing]

It is worth trying the latest build.  I added some new tag writing code in the most recent builds with regard to MP4/m4a files (ALAC would be in m4a).  The "Rating" tag is written to the file if we try updating the tags (from Library).  Not sure what happens when converting, but we should copy all the tags that can be written to the file.

[greynolds]

It is worth trying the latest build.  I added some new tag writing code in the most recent builds with regard to MP4/m4a files (ALAC would be in m4a).  The "Rating" tag is written to the file if we try updating the tags (from Library).  Not sure what happens when converting, but we should copy all the tags that can be written to the file.

Thanks for the response @Yaobing.  I'll find a time when no TV recordings are happening and I have a few minutes free and give it a try.

[greynolds]

Nothing recording tonight, so I was able to install 24.0.68 without interrupting anything.  I resynched the Apple Lossless files and there's no change.  I also took a look at things in a few file viewers and found what seem to be somewhat odd results as follows:

Windows Explorer, with the "Ratings" column added:

1) The original FLAC files don't show a value for rating, even though JRiver shows ratings for all of my audio files (Unexpected result)
2) The exported MP3 files DO show a value for rating and from spot checking, the values are correct (Expected result)
3) The exported M4A (Apple Lossless) files don't show a value for rating (Unexpected result)

MP3Tag:

1) The original FLAC files don't show a value for rating, even though JRiver shows ratings for all of my audio files (Unexpected result)
2) The exported MP3 files don't show a value for rating (Unexpected result)
3) The exported M4A (Apple Lossless) files don't show a value for rating (Unexpected result)

MP3Tag has several possible columns for rating ("Rating MM", "Rating Winamp", and "Rating WMP"), as under the "Extended Fields" category, so I added all 3 to my view, but none of them show a value.

Most, if not all, of the CD's were originally ripped with JRiver using the FLAC encoder.  Most were ripped several years ago, but at least a few were ripped recently, one as recently as a few weeks ago (11/28/2018) with JRiver 24.0.19.

[Yaobing]

1) The original FLAC files don't show a value for rating, even though JRiver shows ratings for all of my audio files (Unexpected result)

This could be the result of you clicking the star rating inside MC (purposefully or accidentally) but you did not save the tags back to the file.

2) The exported MP3 files DO show a value for rating and from spot checking, the values are correct (Expected result)
3) The exported M4A (Apple Lossless) files don't show a value for rating (Unexpected result)

MP3Tag:

1) The original FLAC files don't show a value for rating, even though JRiver shows ratings for all of my audio files (Unexpected result)
2) The exported MP3 files don't show a value for rating (Unexpected result)
3) The exported M4A (Apple Lossless) files don't show a value for rating (Unexpected result)

So tags are saved in locations that may not be recognized by third-party tools.  For mp3, we use ID3 which is quite universally adopted.  For m4a the tagging system is quite arbitrary.  Apple has used several different/contradicting methods and there was no standard way for tags such as "rating".

I tried syncing a couple of APE files to a "device", specifying conversion to ALAC.  The resulting files do have rating tagged.  It is just the question of which tool you use to examine the resulting files.  Some tools recognize what we write, some do not.  If you import those converted files back into MC, you should see the star rating in MC.

[greynolds]

Thanks for the reply, @Yaobing.

This could be the result of you clicking the star rating inside MC (purposefully or accidentally) but you did not save the tags back to the file.

I created the original FLAC files using MC to rip my CDs and use the MC UI when rating them.  So I guess I have purposefully used the star rating inside MC, but I would expect that to automatically update the rating in the files, just like if I change the artist name, or any other tag fields.  Even if it doesn't update the actual file, I would expect the star rating, wherever MC stores it, to be written out to the appropriate tags when syncing to a "device" (where the device in this case is just a folder on one of my drives).  What action am I supposed to take to save the tags back to the file?  The ratings survive restarts of MC and reboots of the PC, so they're obviously being saved somewhere.

So tags are saved in locations that may not be recognized by third-party tools.  For mp3, we use ID3 which is quite universally adopted.  For m4a the tagging system is quite arbitrary.  Apple has used several different/contradicting methods and there was no standard way for tags such as "rating".

I tried syncing a couple of APE files to a "device", specifying conversion to ALAC.  The resulting files do have rating tagged.  It is just the question of which tool you use to examine the resulting files.  Some tools recognize what we write, some do not.  If you import those converted files back into MC, you should see the star rating in MC.

Which tool are you using to examine the resulting files and is there any chance of updating MC to write out the ratings to the field that iTunes expects them to be for ALAC files?  I would think the main reason for people to use ALAC would be to bring files to and from the Apple universe.  My goal here is to import the exported ALAC files into iTunes so I can transfer my music in a high quality format onto my iPhone and iPad.  The ratings are handy for creating some smartlists in iTunes such as Christmas favorites where genre is Christmas and rating is > 3.  I can sort of accomplish that by limiting my MC export to only include those favorite tracks, but then I only have a subset of my music available.

I suppose if I know where the rating is stored, I could use an external tool to move/copy the rating value to where iTunes is expecting it.

[Yaobing]

MediaInfo can read the Rating tag written by MC.

I tried to see where iTunes write the info, but can not find it.  When I edited the star rating in iTunes, it does not write the change to the file. The file was not modified.  When I edited "Comment" field, it does write the edit to file.  That tells me iTunes does not sync "Rating" to file, and therefore likely does not read it from file either.

[greynolds]

MediaInfo can read the Rating tag written by MC.

I tried to see where iTunes write the info, but can not find it.  When I edited the star rating in iTunes, it does not write the change to the file. The file was not modified.  When I edited "Comment" field, it does write the edit to file.  That tells me iTunes does not sync "Rating" to file, and therefore likely does not read it from file either.

Sorry for the delayed response - I wanted to investigate things further on my end and found a few things:

1) iTunes stores ratings in it's own library "database" and doesn't make use of any ratings stored in the music files themselves.  Some people claim this is to make it "easy" for multiple people in a household to share the same music library.  Who knows what Apple's motives were for making this choice...

2) Mp3tag CAN see the ratings values from the files created from MC if I setup a field to pull out "%rating%".

3) I found a discussion of "automatically" importing ratings into iTunes using a tag editor called "Jaikoz", but after playing around with the software, I found it lacking (to be kind).  It cannot be configured to access extended tags that the author didn't include, so it doesn't appear to be possible to access the rating field that MC writes to.

In the end, I decided to just using the grouping tag to put a value of "Favorites" into the tracks that I want to include in my Christmas Favorites playlist.  iTunes recognizes this field and MC writes it out when creating the m4a files, so that will work.  Getting iTunes to recognize updates to files that are already in iTunes is tedious; the only way I've been able to do it so far is to right click on a track and select "Song Info", then use the > button at the bottom to manually go through all the songs.  Kind of tedious for a large number of files, but not MC's fault.

So a follow-up question - is it possible to set MC up so it automatically sets (or clears) a value for the grouping tag based on the rating value that has been selected?  If so, that would save me a few steps when I add new albums or update the ratings for existing tracks.