I’m wondering if anyone has had any luck in getting Rating WMP to autopopulate in their libraries. I’m trying to get my files to be Windows friendly, which doesn’t jive with some of the automation that Mp3tag uses for ratings.
I’ve used Popularimeter for rating, but it uses its 0 to 255 scale, which is a bit confusing when you try to translate its rating to Windows’ 5-star scale. (Not terrible, but it’s a little bit of memorization, which trips up people with bad memories like me.) As well, remembering the exact phrasing of the email/prefix for that tag…
With custom list values, it’s not bad. But to make Windows happy with the song ratings, you have to type out “Windows Media Player 9 Series|” before every rating explicitly or Mp3tag will insert its own email/prefix, which Windows doesn’t like and won’t recognize. As well, when using the Popularimeter column, if space is tight, you don’t see the actual rating. You get “Windows Me…” or however much before the cutoff. Same in the tag panel.
So I tried moving over to Rating WMP. That works, it’s easy to type (just a digit), and takes up very little space. But…it doesn’t autopopulate. You have to select every entry in the library, no bulk selecting, to get the rating to show. So sorting by rating isn’t a choice unless you want to hold down that down key for a while.
I’ve tried working with a Popularimeter/Rating WMP combo to input and output a simple 0-to-5-scale rating. Display is easy, but when you enter the number, you can’t specify any functions or tricks for Mp3tag to format the value. So I can’t type 4 and have it automatically change the value to “Windows Media Player 9 Series|###”. It just saves 4 and puts the Mp3tag email in.
I’m wondering…is there a way to get Mp3tag to automatically display the Rating WMP value? Or has anyone found a way to get Popularimeter to use the Windows-preferred email/prefix instead of its own, so that if I type 255, it saves it as “Windows Media Player 9 Series|255”? I know we can use actions on the files after the fact to standardize the values, but I’m looking for as much set-it-and-forget-it as possible.
My next idea is to set the Value field in the rating column as %popularimeter% and the Field field as %rating wmp%. This way, it displays the 0-to-255 rating but takes in the 0-to-5 rating. I just have to remember to input a rating of 0 to 5 even though I see the rating from 0 to 255. Might work, but it might not be user intuitive for a guy with terrible memory issues.
What would be nice is if we could add functions into the Field field when creating a column so Mp3tag could finesse the value for us. But unless I’m wrong, we can only put straight tag names in there and no more.
Has anyone come across this issue and found a solution?
In case it matters, I’m running Mp3tag v3.33.1 on Windows 11 with “Always display POPULARIMETER values for ID3v2 ratings” off, but it’s been on. I also have (read) ID3v2 and (write) ID3v2→ID3v2.3 UTF-16. No other tag types are checked (though I do plan to enable writing to ID3v1 after I finish cleaning up and standardizing my stuff).
Edit: I just tried specifying the value (display) as %popularimeter% and the field (input) as %rating wmp%. It ends up saving multiple Popularimeter values in the file, one that’s well formatted and another that puts the rating into the playcount part of the tag (so for 3 stars, rating is 0 and playcount is 128). Windows Explorer won’t acknowledge even the well-formatted one. I’ll have to test some more, but hopefully someone here has the solution already.
