I have had my Amarok database die on me in the past and it is waaaay to much work to build these again. I checked one of my files in a hex editor (ogg-vorbis) and could find no sign of my tags or rating so I am assuming that this isn't currently done.

I think the best approach is to use comments for now and add support for new tags and new id3 tag variants become available (if that ever happens)...

I have all my music on NFS, on a share which is *not* read/write.  If you were going to store ratings and tags in id3 tags or ogg comments, where would that leave me and others who have read-only access to their collection? 

I think the better solution would be to back up your database.. perhaps amarok itself could be capable of backing up the database to make it easier for people.  I currently back up my amarok database every couple of days with a cron job.

That's not a bad suggestion..

Or maybe an option to write metadata to file manually
how does that sound... (in the manage files submenu)

In case it's useful to anyone, here's the crontab I use to backup my database:

$ crontab -l
# MIN HOUR DAY MONTH DAYOFWEEK  COMMAND
# at 6:10 a.m. every day
0 6 * * * pg_dump -U amarok -F c -f /home/myhome/files/amarokbackup/amarokbackup.`date +%y.%m.%d`.db amarok

you should backup all your important data... i suggest to use rdiff-backup. I backup my database (and otther stuff) this way (daily cronjob):

#!/bin/bash
mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/backup
mount /boot
rdiff-backup --exclude /mnt --exclude /tmp --exclude /proc --exclude /sys --exclude /dev / /mnt/backup
rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 2W /mnt/backup &> bkp2.txt
umount /boot
umount /mnt/backup
hdparm -y /dev/hdb

Very easy... i can restore every day of the last two weeks.

Thanks for the advice on backing up my database....

I still would like to see support for label to be written to files... even if only so that other programs can support it in future. This functionality exists for jpeg files for instance and is very handy...

I guess it is the sort of thing that could be handled by a script at present so maybe that is the best plan of attack.