[gamelord12]

Songbird is shaping up to be an amazing and ambitious music player, but there's one feature it doesn't have that I'd like it to have: the ability to read and write ratings meta data back to the song itself rather than a library ratings xml file. I asked if this feature was coming and they said that you can enable it by going to about:config in Songbird and changing songbird.metadata.ratings.enableWriting() to true, but that didn't work. At the very least, it didn't save the rating in the same way that Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, and MediaMonkey do. I want to see whatever change I make in Songbird reflected in Windows Explorer when I look at all my files.

I'm an amateur programmer, and I've never contributed to open source before, so large applications are kind of overwhelming to me right now. When I tried to trace the directories in Songbird where other meta data reading took place, I essentially got lost. On top of that, I can't find anywhere through Google searches how meta data is read or stored. I even looked at my files with hex editors, and there were no readable strings in there that represented my meta data. I may be asking a lot right now, but I was wondering if anyone here could explain to me how I can extract and write meta data in song files as well as help me get on the right track with developing for a large scale project like Songbird. All my other experience with programming revolves around only one or two packages; maybe 10 class files in total for the whole thing.