How the star ratings are handled?

Hello Damien,

I just one to know how the star ratings are handled by the system (and all the changes made by Audirvana’s tag page).

When I’m playing a track, if I want to give it a star rating, Audirvana gives me a message that I don’t have enough privileges to modify the file. I understand that in order to modify any information from the track, the file shouldn’t be in use. OK. That’s fine. I change the star rating when the track is not in use. But when I change the star rating and I save, then go to my File Explorer and check the properties of the same file I modified, the changes are not reflected on the file. The star rating is unchanged. The same if I want to change or add information to a track. I make the changes on Audirvana and save them, but they are not reflected on the file.

Maybe I’m misinterpreting what the tag section are doing. But if the tag won’t change flags on the file system, why do I need to stop using the track to make changes? I’d really like the idea of changing info from files using Audirvana. It would make life really easy if I want to use different apps reading the same file song.

Thank you for your answer.

I have similar questions, it seems the rating I gave disappeared after restoring computer from back up. Is there anyway to back up information such ratings for songs?

I would also be interested to know this. My goal is to have all the ratings I made in Audirvana “rendered” to the files. How can I achieve this?

@Damien Is there any information or documentation on this that you could share with us?

Hi, as you can see, there hasn’t been an answer for this question from Damien. I don’t know if he doesn’t know or if he saw the question. Maybe if we make more noise he can read and answer.

What I’ve been doing is rating and re rating the songs every time I change computers. I hate doing that, but in my knowledge there’s no other competing app that offers this feature.

The star rating is, as all other metadata you have in Audirvana, stored in the track itself which means that if you add stars to a track in Audirvana, you will see it in a metadata editor that can handle rating of a track. You will also see it in File Explorer if you do a right click on the file, select property and the Details tab.

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@Antoine Thank you so much for getting back to us on this topic. Is it possible that Audirvana is writing ratings into the files with a proprietary format? Because my other players (e.g. Quod Libet: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and also for instance my meta tag editor Meta (https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/) are unable to see the ratings Audirvana is writing. I also made a short video for you to demonstrate this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kuli1tjyzfphzfm/20210304-rating.mp4?dl=0

Have you saved the rating you have put in your track?

@Antoine Yes, I saved it. The interesting thing is:
When I add the same file to Audirvana on my second computer, Audirvana recognizes the rating. That is why I assumed that Audirvana uses its own proprietary way of saving ratings.

Thank you for answering our question. As amadeusp81 wrote, using file explorer to check if the star rating is written on the file, it doesn’t appear. That’s why I opted out of rating my tracks and relay on the “heart” tag. But unfortunately, it seems that this tag is not added to the metadata of the file.

Can you right click on the track in file explorer and select property? In the details tab, do you see the rating?

On Windows 10, yes. On Macos, it doesn’r appear on the Get Info window, but it does appear the star rating on third party music players. So all is solved now. for me Thank you.

Could you please take a look at the other question I posted about exFAT support? Thank you.

@Antoine Am I missing something or doing something wrong? Thanks for your help!

Can you try to use https://amvidia.com/tag-editor to take a look at the rating of your tracks?

@Antoine No, I can’t see any of the ratings in there as well. Compare:

I changed the ratings, restarted the apps etc. but I had no luck.

@Antoine Any idea what I could do about this?

After further checks, the rating used by tag editor is not standard a the rating of the tag editor is not standard as it should display 20 for a star to 100 for five stars. You should check with MusicBrainz Picard instead and you will see the rating properly.

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@Antoine Interesting! Here’s what I found out:
Audirvana in my case only writes the “rating” tag into files for m4a files. However, it does not write them for flac, wav, mp3 and aif/aiff files. Is that correct? Also, what id3 standard is this exactly? id3 2.3.0? Many thanks for your help.

Hello @amadeusp81,

In Musicbrainz you won’t see the rating of mp4 files as it’s not handled because of iTunes, it’s a custom metadata that is not added in the file by iTunes.