iTunes randomly deleting song ratings

Hi everyone,

I have a pretty straightforward problem with iTunes - my song ratings keep getting randomly deleted.

I am using iTunes 11.1.4 on a 2011 MacBook Pro with Mavericks (10.9.1) and iTunes is managing all my music (all files in the default Music/iTunes folder).

I noticed this only yesterday: I had a bunch of imported music I hadn't yet rated (every song gets rated in my library) and so this week I decided to catch up on that. This was on Monday, then Tuesday I noticed most (about 80-90% of 600 songs) of these recent star ratings were gone. Because it was such painstaking work (it is just really annoying after a while 😝) I didn't rate them all again, but instead used a Time Machine backup of my iTunes library I had made just after finishing rating the songs on Monday. All the ratings were back and I hoped that was that, thus I proceeded to rate the remaining 800 songs.

I absolutely made sure every single song was rated now, which it was.

That was about an hour ago, then I checked again and the rating of 4 songs was gone. Did them again, not much trouble anyway. Now I checked once again, and about 40 ratings are gone. I have no clue what might cause this, that's the first time I experienced anything like it. However this is what I have observed so far:

• Only the "new" ratings from this week keep getting deleted, the old ones remain there (so far). Yet the songs I rated these past days were imported from CD long ago, so I don't really get the time frame.
• Deletion is absolutely random; from a couple of ratings to hundreds at a time, not bound to genre / artist / etc either.
• Please note, just the star ratings get deleted, not the songs themselves. Both album and song ratings are randomly deleted.
• I do use iTunes Match, but import into iTunes Match was completed quite a while ago. On my iPhone (which I use Match for) the song ratings correspond to what's happening in the library, i. e. when the rating's gone in iTunes, there's none on the iPhone's iTunes Match either.
• It happens no matter if iTunes is running or not; the first time I quit it and when I opened it again the ratings were gone. Now I haven't quit iTunes all day and it keeps deleting nevertheless.
• Internet connection was active all the time.
• I didn't alter any settings in iTunes or generally on the MacBook in the past time.

I'd really hate to have to do this over and over again since that's quite a lot songs to rate all the time and I rely on these ratings heavily for smart playlists etc.

I just wonder if anyone else is experiencing such a problem and if there's a fix somehow. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

PS - While writing this, another 50 song ratings got deleted 😢

Thanks a lot and best wishes.

- Lara