The madness of metadata (or a new reason to hate Windows Media Player)

Recently my Windows Media Player stopped working on my work machine. It was complaining about a DLL mismatch, so I figured this was its way of saying “Upgrade me now!!!”. So I obliged it and downloaded the latest and greatest from Microsoft and installed it. And about 10 seconds later I regretted it. As it was scanning for my music library, it managed to find all of the music I ripped from various CDs (which is good, now I don’t have to re-rip them), then it managed to find the playlists I had made (which is great, because it was a pain making them), and then….. It managed to not find any of the ratings I had entered for the 700+ songs in my library. Not that I had all 700+ rated, but I had over half done because that is part of how I was making my playlists. Is it so hard to update the mp3 files and put the rating in there? Why does everyone (iTunes does this too) keep the ratings in a separate file? Ugh. What a pain in the ass. I’m debating if its even worth re-rating those files or ifI should try to whip up a program to take my iTunes ratings and try to have it update the mp3 files on my various machines.