foobar2000 Guide to use ratings

Step By Step Guide To Use Ratings with Foobar v 9.5 beta 4

I had to find these items in multiple threads so I've tried to pull all of the sections mentioning ratings into just one "how-to" file. Hopefully, this will help people who would like a rating feature in Foobar. All of these steps use the existing features of the most current Foobar beta version with just one additional component "Quick Tagger", which is officially supported by Foobar.

Step 1: Get Quick Tagger which is needed to update "Rating" tag
Download: Quick Tagger from http://foobar2000.org/components/
Then add this to the foobar2000 /components directory on your hard drive.

Step 2: Set Up Rating Field for PlayList
Open Foobar Preferences -> Display -> Default User Interface -> Colors And Fonts
You will need a Unicode font for this. I used Arial Unicode MS which comes with MS Office.

Open Foobar Preferences -> Display -> Default User Interface -> Playlist View
Under Custom Columns, Click "Add New" button
Set Name To: Rating
Set Pattern To: $pad($repeat(★,%rating%), 5,✩)

Foobar does not use the default font for display so if you cut and paste this into the pattern, you will see that the stars turn into boxes, but it still works in the playlist window. If you just want to display the number instead of stars, then put %rating% into the pattern.

Step 3: Add "Rating" to Preferences box
Open Foobar Preferences -> Advanced -> Display -> Properties Dialog -> Standard Fields.
Add "Rating=RATING;" to the end of the string
Now when you open the properties field, you can change the rating for single or multiple files, just like you can for other properties.

Step 4: Set Up Quick Tagger for "Rating" tag
Open Foobar Preferences -> Tools -> Tagging -> Quick Tagger
Click "Add New" button

Field Name Values (semicolon-separated)
Rating 0; 1; 2; 3; 4; 5

I've used 0 as an easy way to clear a rating. Under this you'll see another box:
Require confirmation before processing more [ ] tracks

Set this to 1 if you don't want confirmation for single updates. Set to a very high number if you never want confirmation on multiple file updates.

Now that this is done, you can <right click> on your song to change the rating. Choose "Tagging -> Quick Tagger -> Set <Rating> To -> 0 through 5.

Step 5: Set Up Quick Keyboard Shortcuts To Update Tags
Open Foobar Preferences -> General -> Keyboard Shortcuts
Click "Add New" button

Action:
Filter List by: Rating
You'll See: Tagging -> Quick Tagger -> Set <Rating> to
Underneath are the Values set in Step 3 (0 to 5 for this example)

Key: Press the key you want:
I've used Ctrl 0->5 to set 0 to 5 as my rating when I do single file updates.

Now Click "Save All" button when done

<Added 11/24/2007>
The one problem I've noticed since my original posting is that I can consistently use the keyboard shortcuts for single files, but haven't always been able to use the keyboard shortcut consistently when tagging multiple music files. This happens even though I set:
Require confirmation before processing more [ ] tracks
to 10000 in Step 4 above.

I can get around this, by using the 2 other options:
1.) <right clicking> then Properties and setting the rating in the property window, or
2.) <right clicking> then Tagging -> Quick Tagger -> Set Value To -> then picking the number for the rating.
<End Edit>