Everyone who uses Winamp and its rating scheme will at some time have
found out, that these vanish into thin air if you change the paths of
the mp3's in question and / or manage to "loose" the media library
files. There are several topics on Winamp forums discussing how to make
these ratings more accessible and save them in the files as tags -
solutions offered so far have been very complicated and not exactly
fail safe.

There are several tags available in many tagging programs which hardly
anybody ever uses (url, composer, copyright, subtitle, etc.) and which
one could transfer ratings to. IF only Winamp did support those, which
it doesn't. OTOH all the taggers I've come across dannot manage Winamp
ratings, as they don't "see" them, being stuck away in the proprietary
music library.

IMHO the only way to get around this Catch 22 situation would be to
save all, say, 5* rated songs in Winamp to a playlist, then have a
tagger import the playlist, i.e. the files contained. You could then
simply write an appropriate value to a tag field of your choice, e.g.
"5 star". Any flaws in this rationale?

Now what's missing here - or at least I haven't found it - is a tagger
able to import Winamp playlist, not only write them (they all can do
that!). Any ideas?

Sheygetz

OK, I finally found just the program myself. MP3Tag indeed does import
playlist, i.e. you can tag across a wild array of directories all the
files you put into a playlist - say, all Winamp 3* rated titles. Also
the program allows tagging for almost any field in the specs, among
others the "encoded by" field, which incidentally is also read by
Winamp and can be employed to build ML views.

So, all Winamp 3* rated titles go into 3star.m3u, this is then opened
in Mp3Tag. All files are tagged 3* in the "encoded by" field. Now, if
ever your Winamp ML gets lost or blown to pieces, you can either
restore the ratings from that field, or better still, do henceforth not
use the proprietary rating, but enter your ***s in that field in Winamp.