I have spent hours and hours tagging my iTunes music with appropriate 'Star-Ratings' based on my listening preferences. The mere thought of accidentally losing all of this time and the detailed ratings I've applied is terrifying.
Aside from simply exporting my iTunes "Master Library.xml" file on a regular basis, I would like to try and find a way to somehow physically embed the Star-Rating score of each given track directly into the track itself in the Finder (probably by annotating the spotlight comments field for each given track).
Why would I seek doing something like this?
As a photographer, I shoot my photographs in RAW format, and I typically wind up converting from my Canon proprietary RAW images (CR2) into Adobe's Digital Negative (DNG) format. One of the big reasons I do this is so that I don't have to deal with the .xmp sidecar file (which contains all of the RAW adjustment and editing information for image). With DNG, what would have normally been a separate, external metadata file containing a files unique adjustment information is actually embedded into the file itself. This prevents cases in which the sidecar files can get lost or corrupt. I like have a self contained entity with all of the relevant information I need for a given image (or music file for that matter)
Rather than having to rely on exporting my iTunes Library and considering that as my sole backup of my hours and hours of ratings metadata for my music, I'd like to find a way to embed this information directly into the file itself, which in theory could somehow be re-extracted at a later date if need be and re-imported back into a new/different iTunes Library such that certain metadata fields such as the ratings score in my case, would be maintained.
To simplify, my ideal solution would be an applescript that would gather all of my tracks in iTunes with a 5-star rating, and it would then apply a spotlight comment ~ like "Rating=5" ~ to each of those tracks in the Finder. It would then do the same thing for all tracks rated as 4, 3, 2, and 1-star.
Not really sure how this spotlight comment could then be used to re-import the tracks into a different/new iTunes library while maintaining this rating info, but I wouldn't put it past some of the scripting gurus on these forums to think up a way...
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated... Thanks!
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