Hello everybody!
I have been using ubuntu linux for about six months. I have a music partion shared with windows. all my mp3 are star rated with windows media player with 'global rating', ie i can see the ratings in windows explorer, which is very useful. that means the stars are stored on the file itself, and not in the playlist. but still, in linux the stars are not visible.
Is there any way by which i can retrieve/modify the star rating and save it on the file (global)?

Just because the rankings appear in Explorer doesn't mean they are part of the files themselves, because windows apps are rather tightly integrated. Chances are Explorer is simply getting the data straight from the same database WMP stores them in.

I haven't used Windows since Win98, and WMP since even earlier, so I don't know much about it directly. But according to some google hits, it looks like the data is stored in a database file in a location like C:\Documents and Settings\<my username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\CurrentDatabase_<somenumber>.wmdb. Several comments also showed that it can get corrupted, which means that it's probably a binary file and extracting text data from it might be difficult to impossible.

Is there perchance some feature in WMP for exporting the data, say to a csv file or something?

Thanks.
No, there is no export facility there.
but even if it is not possible to import the stras, can i add new star in linux which will be saved in the file itself, and not the playlist?
i hav a lan, with all music on one comp. also i keep experimenting with different distros, so i want a global rating system which i will never lose.
bye.

Perhaps you could examine the tags using id3info2. The rating is probably stored in some sort of database. Amarok can use a mysql database backend. The statistics table has a rating field that may be used when you transfer a song or podcast to a media device.

Amarok (available for ubuntu) itself has a rating system you can use. It can count the number of times you play the file and also some general rating system. I think it can be saved in the file TAG.

Please read and support great idea of s/w independent rating system on: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17523/
thank you