I have a pretty large library of music. I decided a while back that I'd get more out of it by taking the time to rate all of my songs. Every day for the last few months I rate songs on he drives to and from work. I've made quite a dent at this point. I've noticed, however, that my ratings aren't showing up in Vista's Explorer windows. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, in Windows Vista, if you're looking in a directory with music or images in it, you'll get a column called "Rating" with stars in it, just like in iTunes. Unfortunately, however, the ratings information you see in iTunes isn't stored in the song as metadata, it's stored in a separate XLM file that only iTunes accesses. I don't know where Vista stores it's rating information off hand.

Does anyone know of a way to get my iTunes ratings to transfer over to Vista?

Thanks,
Dustin
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There is no way iTunes will do this.

iTunes was not coded to use the ratings field of the ID3 tag but rather keep it in its own database (in fact the ITL file, not the XML one). Other music managers may work differently you'll have to investigate which uses the ID3 tag.

Someone has bound to have a made a script to do this but I can't say for sure.
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Is there even an ID3 tag for rating? I know there's no such thing as a "tag standard" but still...
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There is no "standard" ID3 tag for ratings but there's a built-in system which could be used to accomplish that. I'm told WMP uses ratings stored in tags, for example. It's just a matter of wanting it done. But keeping ratings in a local database ties users to the program. ;)
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I would assume Vista gets this info from Windows Media Player, if so all you will need to do is sync the libraries. I have heard of MusicBridge (http://jrmwillis.googlepages.com/) on a podcast, but I have never used it myself. MusicBridge is supposed to be able to sync the metadata from the library files (not the tags) between iTunes and WMP's libraries including playlists and ratings.

Let us know how this works if you choose this route. I don't have Vista to test it.

Edit: According to Paul Thurrot's article Sync iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Zune (http://www.internet-nexus.com/2007/09/sync-itunes-windows-media-player-and.htm) the Zune software also has the utilities built into it to sync the library data between iTunes and WMP. I heard of MusicBridge on the Windows Weekly podcast he does with Leo Laporte.
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Thanks guys, that gives me a couple things to try. I really wish there were ID3 standards for things like ratings. It would that information way more portable which, as electrozoid pointed out, is probably exactly why companies don't do it - they want to tie you to their software. Not that I want to get away from iTunes at the moment, but I'd like to think I have that option without taking any major hits...like loosing the metadata I've spent who knows how long putting into place. That's a real bummer.

Thanks again,
Dustin
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Embedded ratings don't really fit into the scheme of things. Things like Song name, Artist, Album, Year, Genre (can be debated), Track number and some other stuff are absolute values. Other info, like Date added, Play count, Last played, Skip count and most notably, Rating are only applicable to YOUR library and music. And that's why Apple chose to save that info in the local .itl file instead.
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