Helping my father, transfer ratings to something else. Windows media? iTunes?

[cire]

Hey there.  I'm not familiar with the phatnoise software, but my fathers computer is buggier than the movie "Antz".  It desperately needs a reformat (and he desperately needs to learn that any company that wants to install ANYTHING on your computer is spam/spyware until you've confirmed otherwise).

But the issue of the hour is he has some sort of head unit in his RV that he can stick flash drives into and he said that it requires phatnoise media manager to copy the songs so the head unit can recognize them.

So for the past few years he's put ratings on all 5,200 songs he has.  And he doesn't want to lose those ratings.  I've copied the whole phatnoise directory over to my flash drive.  I've also deleted his phatnoise directory and successfully brought the ratings back by just copying the phatnoise directory back to his hard drive.

But I don't like the fact that Kenwood requires you to install and use phatnoise to copy songs over to a flash drive to use on the headunit.  It seems too much like a spyware tactic to me.

I'd love to have him start using something that'll be a bit more user friendly.  In fact, I'd love it if I could have him start using Windows Media Player or iTunes.  How do I export the ratings from phatnoise to any other program?

[sbingner]

It stores the data in a sqlite database -- you could extract it, but I don't know an easy way

When you copy it back, you should be able to just overwrite the .db files and get all the info back

[markbowen]

Hey mods, this is in the wrong section.

Anyway, you most certainly do not have to use PMM to copy songs to the USB drive for Kenwood head units to recognize them.  Using PMM creates a database on the drive that makes organizing tracks on the drive, but you aren't tied to the software.  You could use WMP or iTunes.  You can even just drag and drop the folders/files to the drive, without using any software, though you'd have to take care to organize the files and folders properly to get albums to play in the right track order.

As for the ratings, though, unlike the normal tag fields (artist, title, etc.) the PMM ratings ("My Rating") are not stored in the appropriate "rating" field of the ID3 tag.  So, without PMM you would lose those ratings.  However, you could use a good tagging program (e.g. Tag & Rename) to manually add the ratings tags.