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From my Windows music manager programs (either MediaMonkey or Windows Media Player) I could set song ratings in a way that the ratings set from either program could be also read from the other one. Additionally, song ratings were visible and updated in my iPod Touch when I synch'ed my music (either manually or using iTunes). To sum up, it seems that MediaMonkey, WMP, and the iPod device use standard mp3 metadata tag for ratings.

Now, using Ubuntu 12.04, and now with an Android device:

  1. Rhythmbox can't see the song rates, despite those ratings can be seen by MediaMonkey and MS Music Player when I boot with Win7. Is this an issue I can fix with some setting? Is there any program I can use to accomplish this?

  2. What do you recommend to sync my music with Android (4.0, Galaxy s2), also keeping the song ratings information updated between Android and my PC?

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  • Update: so far, I believe the best thing is looking for three separate solutions: (a) Desktop player that reads and edit rating tags, (b) Android player that reads the same tags, (c) a file sync solution. For (a), the best I could find was MediaMonkey (Win) and gMusicBrowser (Linux). For (c) I will just use rsync or similar. For (b)... no good news, yet. I couldn't find any Android Music player that doesn't use a custom proprietary ratings DB. I have written to some Devs waiting for feedback.
    – Sebastian
    Nov 22, 2012 at 21:28
  • I'm not sure if this helps, but I'm going to try this out.. Sync music between Ubuntu and Android Jan 1, 2013 at 14:41

3 Answers 3

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Amarok supports the FMPS_Rating tags which Nick B refers to (and has for a while I think). Settings > Configure Amarok > Collection > Write statistics to file.

If you examine those files with kid3, you'll see the tags. I've only recently begun using it.

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OK, this is how I decided to solve this:

  • Desktop side: use MediaMonkey in Win and gMusicBrowser in Linux. I really enjoy the latter because you can customize how the information is displayed in several ways. It is not fancy (no super-UI, controls, etc.), but I care more about the features, not the details in the UI. You can also set smart lists based on almost any criteria. Really nice product.
  • Android: I have bought Poweramp, the highest rated player in the store. Another very solid product, extremely cheap considering the features you get. It does not read ratings from tags, BUT I have exchanged emails with its author and this feature is scheduled for the next release (no ETA, though..). The prayer is so good that I have bought now (and I will patiently wait for the upcoming release).
  • Synch: solved mounting the SD card and running rsync (one script for Desktop -> Android, another for Android -> Desktop). I need manually run it depending on where I did my latest change, but I can live with that.

Thanks,

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  • 1
    This is helpful, I was looking for such solution. Could you let me know where to get synch? Jan 1, 2013 at 14:30
  • I would kiss you just for pointing me at gMusicBrowser. I'm completely blown away, it's exactly what I needed as a replacement for WMP 11 or even MediaMonkey. I've been "stuck" with banshee but no more. Btw you say yours can read the ratings from both Windows players? How is that? Mine can't, I've set it to read the rating tag as "rating", "Rating" and "POPM" yet nothing, can't get the banshee/MM/WMP11 ratings on gMB...
    – sinekonata
    May 31, 2013 at 12:06
  • I still have this question for android, and I thought I'd provide an update to the Poweramp situation. Poweramp does have a rating system, but it's not popm in the MP3 idv3 tags (which Mediamonkey/WMP use) and it doesn't support half star ratings. There is a third party program that can synchronize in either direction though called Music Playlist Manager by flyingdutchman. I linked a tasker script to automate that process on this forum post forum.powerampapp.com/topic/…
    – Zediiiii
    Sep 14, 2023 at 20:30
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My default ICS music player (which i rarely use) doesn't seem to show ratings, so it's hard to say.

As you've no doubt realised the only practical way around this problem is using ratings in tags. This won't work with iTunes AFAIK. However the problem is that for MP3 in particular, there is no universal ratings system for ID3. That said,

  1. Various music players, including Quod Libet (I'm one of the devs) should be able to read these ratings formats for MP3. There are further subtleties about the scale used by WMP vs MM so your ratings may not be exactly the same, especially at the lower end of the scale. There is also discussion about adapting to fully support the new(ish) FMPS specs, which one day might solve this (but maybe not).

  2. Once you've solved this, to keep the changes in sync across devices you're back to a much more familiar file synchronisation problem; there are many solutions to this. I'd recommend mounting the android disk locally then using something like Unison,but there are lots of file synchronisation alternatives.

HTH

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  • Nick, thanks for the info. I am exploring different ICS music players, and also different Linux music players (Rhythmbox is too basic, Banshee is better but unstable). However my progress has been slow... I will probably be working on this a little each week, and I will post my findings when I am done.
    – Sebastian
    Nov 5, 2012 at 3:15

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