If you use both Windows Media Player and iTunes to manage your music, keeping your ratings synchronised can be a pain. Orzeszek Ratings lets you sync your play counts and ratings between Windows Media Player and iTunes with two clicks.
Windows Media Player and iTunes must be installed on the same computer, and must be pointing to the same files for Orzeszek Ratings to sync the play counts and ratings for the files.
That means that ratings and play counts for any files that are converted when they’re added to your library (like WMA files added to iTunes) won’t be synced, since your Windows Media Player library and iTunes library are no longer referring to the same file.
You may also want to check out MusicBridge. MusicBridge has a few more options, including the ability to sync track number, name, artist, album, album artist, year, genre, album art, and rating (but no option to sync play count).
However, I’ve found that MusicBridge’s rating sync is quirky. Some 3-star ratings in Windows Media Player become 2.5-star ratings when synced to iTunes, etc. The reasons are explained somewhat here. This quirkiness is one of the reasons why I wrote Orzeszek Ratings.
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
ty made everything so much easier
I’m glad it worked.
I was looking for a software that can add playcounts of iTunes and WMP. I use iPod whose playcount is automatically added to iTunes playcount. However, on my PC I use WMP to play music. It will be great if both the playcounts are added instead of replacing one with another. I hope you will add this option in the next release. Please update me on my email if u add any such feature.
thanks
ujjwal
That can’t work.
Suppose that you have a song, and you play it three times in WMP and five times in iTunes (or on the iPod). The first time you add the play counts together, you would get eight, which is the correct amount.
However, then your play count in WMP would be eight and your play count in iTunes would be eight. If you synced again (without playing the song), adding the play counts together, you would get 16, which is wrong.
I’ve updated Orzeszek Ratings, adding two options: ‘Only sync play count if higher’ and ‘Aggregate and move play count’. The first only syncs the play count to the destination application if the play count in the source application is higher than the play count in the destination application. The second adds the two play counts together, stores that aggregate in the destination application, and zeros the play count in the source application.
This isn’t a perfect way to aggregate the play counts, but some people may find this way useful. (As far as I can tell, there is no way to do it properly.)
You can get the new version from http://www.orzeszek.org/dev/ratings.
does not work with itunes 9, build.70
It’s working for me with iTunes 9.0.1.8. Can you provide any further details?
Just a thought… perhaps ratings could be aggregated if the time of each aggregation/sync was recorded and then the next time it synced all the plays since the previous sync were aggregated and added to both players’ playcounts (if that made any sense at all)
@Kaylee: That could be done, but you would have to turn this little utility into a whole app. Right now, it just copies the data from the WMP database to the iTunes database, or vice versa. To do a proper aggregation of the play counts, the application would have to maintain its own database of all of your music.
I’m afraid I just don’t have time to design something like that at the moment. Sorry.
I’ll be featuring this on Skatter Tech shortly. This is an awesome tool, a great step up from MusicBridge. Simple and get’s the job done. This is entirely compatible with the latest version of iTunes as of March 2010 and WMP12 on Windows 7 right?
I’m glad people are finding it useful.
I’m using it myself with iTunes 9.0.3 and WMP 12 on Windows 7, and it works fine.
Thanks a tonne! The application works great, and is incredibly useful for those of us who don’t want use iTune’s slow ass anymore than we need to (IE: syncing iPod).
Thanks again!
Oh, one question though.
You wouldn’t happen to know if this causes any issues with reporting to last.fm would you?
I haven’t specifically tested it because I don’t use Last.fm (and I’m not sure that it’s available to Australian users for free).
However, I can’t see any reason why it would interfere with anything. This utility just copies over the ratings and, as far as I know, the effect is the same as if you had rated the song using the player’s user interface.
The music recommendation, tracking features, and social features work regardless of where you are.
I guess my concern lies more with how last.fm gets the amount of plays from itunes (and from it an ipod) rather than the transferring over.
I haven’t had any issues yet, if I do, I’ll let you know.
OK. Thanks.
Great utility! Just bought an iPod, but use Windows Media Player 12 WMP12 as my primary PC music app…thanks a lot Chris – clear, simple, fast implementation. ;-)
I’m glad you like it. :-)
Found this via Google while searching on a problem.
Do you happen to know if it is possible to export itunes ratings into the file? What I mean is, with windows 7 and Vista you can rate a file directly from windows explorer properties. I’m guessing that metadata goes into the file itself?
I’m trying to figure out if it is possible to export itunes ratings into that system.
@Craig: The only way I know how to do it is as follows:
If you have the same file in the iTunes library and in the WMP library and have WMP set to ‘Maintain my star ratings as global ratings in files’, you can use Orzeszek Ratings to sync ratings from iTunes to WMP, which will have the effect of writing those ratings to the file.
I don’t know of any software that can export the iTunes ratings directly to the file (ie, without going through WMP).
Thanks for that. I’ll give it a go. I don’t normally use WMP as I dislike the way it scatters its little jpgs all over my fiile system. It looks messy and they bug me :)
It is a bit of a mess.
The tool seems to be really great. I hope that it will work for me. I’m using Orzeszek Ratings 1.2 with WMP 12.0.7600 and iTunes 9.1.1.12 (french version). It doesn’t work when I synchronize my “Ratings” from WMP to Itunes. Nothing has changed in my iTunes library (The rating information isn’t already specified in the iTunes library). Do you have any idea? Maybe, I should find a new version for the DLLs?
Thanks a lot
I don’t know why it’s not working off the top of my head. It might be that the DLLs that I’ve included don’t work with the French version of iTunes, for example. Have a look at MusicBridge, which is a tool that does something similar to Orzeszek Ratings. Let me know if that works. If it does, it’ll mean there’s something wrong with Orzeszek Ratings and I’ll try to figure out what it is when I have some time.
Thanks,
it doesn’t work with MusicBridge
Do you know where I can find other versions of the DLL?
The DLLs that are included with Orzeszek Ratings are just pointers, effectively, to the DLLs that come with iTunes and WMP. That is, if you have the latest iTunes and the latest WMP, you have the latest DLLs.
It may be that the ‘pointer’ DLLs are broken or out of date. When I have some time, I’ll check that and update them if necessary. If you drop me an e-mail at this address, I can let you know when I’ve done that.
However, given that it doesn’t work with MusicBridge either, it might be some other problem with your configuration.
Are you sure that iTunes and WMP are pointing at the same MP3 files? iTunes has an option to copy music you add to its library to its own folder (usually a folder named iTunes under your Music folder).