Using and working with a custom field

[azfrankie]

Hello everyone,
I have a request and question that may sound a bit odd. Prologue: Ever since collecting digital music I lobbied for ratings to be saved inside the single files. Back then I used Winamp. This subject was discussed various times in their forum but never taken into serious consideration (even though there were many users who supported my request). Therefore I just "misused" the "BPM" field to enter my ratings. I basically use a five-star-rating with have half steps. So, 5 stars is "10" points; 3 1/2 stars yields a "7" and so on. I hope you get the idea.

In MusicBee I'm finding the custom fields and I would like to convert my rating from the "BPM" field to "Custom3". Since I'm tagging my digital files using MP3Tag editor I will have to work using this table:
http://help.mp3tag.de/main_tags.html
According to this post (http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=15257.msg90997#msg90997) users have done similar things but the preferences urge me to use a predefined value (which I don't want). So, whatever value is entered in the file is only meant to be stored in my database. But how do I address that? How can I call the value in that field? Can anyone tell me what ID3 abbreviation I need to address when using the Custom3 field? Thanks you guys in advance!!

[psychoadept]

I'm a little confused.  You want to move the values in BPM to Custom 3.  That's simple enough (this is an operation that you can perform quickly and easily with the Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools plugin).

What I would do is define a new tag in Preferences (don't call it Rating, but Ratings might work - just to keep MB from confusing it with the actual Rating tag).  This tag will show up in your files as TXXX/Tag Name.  Then configure Custom 3 to point to the new field, and rename it to the same thing as your newly defined tag.  Then use the plugin I mentioned above to copy BPM to Ratings (or whatever you call it).  Test on a small batch first, but it should pretty easily do your whole library.

On the other hand, you say you want Rating saved in the files, which is already possible.  You could just set MB to save ratings in the file (look in Tags (1) preferences), make some playlists for each rating group, and retag them en masse with the actual Rating tag.

If I've missed the importance of the MP3Tag chart and the rest of what you've said, maybe you can give an example?  I didn't really understand that.