Ratings, Album Ratings, and Various Artists questions

[EdwardHyena]

I am working on migrating my library to a server so the rest of my family can access the tracks. I have already read that there is not a way natively to have different Media Monkeys look to the same file library and set different ratings, but I have some questions / workaround possiblities I wanted to ask about.

1) Is there a way to stop Media Monkey from writing ratings to files, other than setting the files to read only? I have no problem using read only but I'm concerned that it may wipe ratings from the database since the files themselves have that field blank, and it constantly asks me to update files which I have set to Read Only. It's obnoxious.

2) If I go the "custom fields" route, is there a way for us to tell our seperate media monkeys which one to pull rating from when in menus, or to tell MMA which field to pull from when we're trying to play tracks on the go?

The other questions are:
3) Is there a way to set an album rating that isn't an average of the songs? Sometimes there's a 5 star album (like Pink Floyd's Animals" but not every track itself is 5 stars. (Pigs on the Wing for example)

4) Is there a way to not populate artists from Various Artist albums in the Artists list? I listen to Chillhop and Eurovision, so my Artist list is clunky and fuil of artists who I only have one song from hidden in a compilation.

[Lowlander]

1) This would be the best way. Maintain frequent backups of your Library. You can disable tag writing in MediaMonkey, but this doesn't fully prevent tag writes.

2) No

3) No, it's a calculated value

4) No Artists is designed to show Artist, Album Artists is designed to show Album Artists.