Okay, so I managed to lose all the ratings and playcounts in my iTunes music library. I still had that data on the iPod, but it wouldn’t update iTunes (since I had the iPod set to manually update because out library is bigger than the iPod). I did some desperate Googling tonight and discovered iPod-iTunes Data 1.0.1. It’s not the prettiest application in the world, but I’m happy to report that it copied all my metadata back to my Mac. (Tip: I had trouble getting it to work at first because I didn’t read the fine print about setting the “update” dates at the bottom, which default to the current date. It only checks songs that you’ve played since that day, so if you’re doing it for the first time, you need to click the down arrow about a million times to get back to the first day you used the iPod. That was easy in my case, but it could be a bitch if you’ve had yours a long time.)