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[pgrisham]

I just noticed that the Year field is blank for every song in my collection, except for the 4 songs I bought from Amazon 3 days ago. The weird thing is this: I can check another computer with almost the same music files (backed up a few weeks back), and these have the year tag showing in MC on the other computer. If I copy them to my main computer and open a file in MC, the year tag is gone again. I really, really, would like to get all my year tags back  .

I even downloaded a freeware portable mp3 tagger just to see what the standard tag looked like outside of MC. The weird thing is that the tagger said there were no year tags in the files I checked, but if I open Windows Media Player and play a file from my collection on my hard drive, the year actually shows up there on some songs, but not others...very weird stuff.

Is this a possible quirk in MC? I am using version 21.0.17, but it was this was on 15 also.

[RoderickGI]

If the year tags are shown in other applications then the tags are probably in the files. If some programs don't show the tags, then the tag format may be a later version than that program can read. For example the program may only be able to read ID3v1 tags, while the tags in your files are in ID3v2.3 format.

If you want to see what tags are actually in your files, click on an audio file, then in the Action Window click on "Tag", then up the top you will see some information about the file, in the form something like "MP3 - 1:47 - 1.6MB", right under the Tag heading. When you hover over that information you will see it is a hyperlink, as it becomes underlined. Click on that link and all the tags that are actually in the file are displayed, as opposed to those in the Library.

Anyway, if the tags are in your files, but not in your library, select a file then right click on it, select "Library Tools", then "Update Library (from tags)". That should put the year tag into the MC library and make it visible to you. If you are happy with what MC did, select all the files you want to fix, and run the update for all of them. Perhaps do them in chunks so that each run doesn't take too long, and check you aren't getting a result you don't like. There may be other tags in the files which may overwrite the tags you already have in the Library.

Make sure you back up you Library before you start, so that you can revert if something goes wrong. File/Library/Back Up Library.

Done.

[pgrisham]

Thanks for your tips. I actually was doing a similar version of your instructions already. By the way, I still have no idea what happened to my tags. What I did was load the library from my other computer and then updated tags from library. Then I loaded my regular local library and chose update library from tags (in chunks, just as you suggested). I tested it first, and this did the trick. I did have to manually fix a few files that were added/updated since my last backup, but overall it only took me about an hour to finish.

This program is awesome. I could not have fixed this very easily without some of MC's great library features. I just wish I knew what happened in the first place!

[pgrisham]

I edited my title some because I just tried this again and found another issue. I am simply using copy/replace to copy the Year tag into the Date tag, and using Copy (leaves source) as my option. The result is my year and date fields end up as 1905, or more specifically, June 30, 1905. I confirmed this on a batch operation of hundreds (unfortunately!) of files, and also on a single file.

Is this a bug? My only other thought would be that date must use some special format instead of just simply having a 4-digit year as its contents, but even if this is true, why did it mess up my original Year field???

I am using latest version.

[ferday]

What do you mean "copy"...what type of copy are you using? 

To do what you want you should be selecting the files then typing into the date field

=[year]

[pgrisham]

I am using the Move/Copy Fields option under the Library Tools right-click menu.

[ferday]

Hmmm.  That should work but, just to be safe, select a block of files and try my method.  I use it all the time and have never once had an issue. 

Select the files (try some first), select tag, then type =[year] into the date field.  Once you're satisfied you can do them all at once

[Matt]

Next build:
Fixed: Using the Move/Copy Fields tool on the Date field would end up with wacky values in the date (because it's actually a floating point number) instead of taking the value and interpreting it as a date.