This is an extension for Rate Your Music (RYM) users who want to have their RYM ratings inside their Songbird music library. It also lets you search RYM for relevant releases when looking at tracks in your library, and has options for adding features to the RYM site whilst browsing in Songbird.

Usage:

1. Open Ratebird options menu and enter your RYM username.
2. Log into RYM using Songbird.
3. Go to your library and select all tracks you wish to rate. Then:
   • Open the Ratebird sidebar pane and click 'Rate Items'
   • Or, you can right-click on the selected tracks and select 'Get ratings for these items from RYM'.
   • Your ratings list is retrieved from RYM and then stored the first time you click 'Rate Items'. You can update the stored list at any point by clicking 'Download RYM Ratings List'.
4. Rejoice in the cornucopia of ratings which ensues.

Limitations:

• Multiple matches are not currently addressed; they shouldn't occur in regular use if tags are reasonably correct, but one possible case is that of a band who has released a number of split EPs with other bands, as these releases are often titled 'Split'. Ratebird currently only returns the first match it finds; I will address this in a future release.
• Songbird's method of storing ratings on media files is currently incompatible with Itunes and WMP. See here and here for more on this.
• RYM doesn't have an API so as far as I can see, rating in SB and uploading the ratings to RYM will be impossible for the foreseeable future.

Tagging:

Your media files are matched with a RYM rating through their Artist and Album tags. It is case-insensitive and some stripping/replacing of common HTML characters, leading/trailing spaces and disc identifiers (e.g. AlbumName [CD1]) is performed. If something doesn't match:

• Check your tags are the same as, or as close as possible to, those featured on the relevant release page(s) of the RYM site.
• If you think your tags are correct but RYM has got it wrong, do something about it on the RYM site.
• If something should match that doesn't then please post the exact artist and album tags in the comments and I will have a look at it.