I realized this was probably better suited for this thread than in the beta thread:
NEW: Added the library tool "Lookup Date From Google".
This is a pretty awesome feature. But I was playing around a little bit and seem to be getting inconsistent results. And I'm also curious if it can be improved upon.
Is it doing a search on just Artist and Name fields? If so, can it instead use the Album title if present and fall back to Name if not? This is better in a couple of ways:
Google seems to return just a year when I manually do a search for Artist and Name, but it oftentimes returns a full Month, Day, Year date when I search on the album name.
It leads to more consistent dates within an album when, for instance, a track is released late in one year but the album is released early the following year.
For example, I searched my library for a track with no date at all and I inexplicably found that I had David Lee Roth - California Girls in my library. No idea how it got there, but there it was. I had MC do the date search and it came back with 1985. I then manually did a google search for "David Lee Roth California Girls release date" and I see that Google returns 1985. So far so good, but I prefer a full date with month and day if I can find it. So I then did a manual search for "David Lee Roth Crazy from the Heat release date" (the album that the California Girls track was on) and Google came back with January 28, 1985. Much better.
I then moved on to something more recent. I manually did a search for "Tool Pneuma release date" and Google returned 2019. But when I search for "Tool Fear Inoculum release date" I get August 30, 2019. Again, the full date is available if I search for album where it's not with just song title.
I then had it do a search for the entire Fear Inoculum album and got a rather surprising result. Every song had its date field populated with the 2019 year with the exception of the title track (Fear Inoculum), which was left blank. I wondered if it was because it was the title track so I tried it on another album, Ride the Lightning by Metallica. Once again all tracks had a year populated with the exception of the track actually titled Ride The Lightning.
But then I noticed something else. A couple of tracks, Fight Fire With Fire and Creeping Death, now have the year of 1983 whereas the rest show 1984. A little sleuthing work showed these songs were first released as a demo on October 29, 1983, so I'm assuming that's where Google is getting its answer, but it wasn't officially released until July 27, 1984 along with the rest of the album. Also, just like with Fear Inoculum, the title track Ride the Lightning has no year returned at all, even though my manual Google search of "Metallica Ride the Lightning release date" returns the full July 27, 1984 date, since it's matching on the album title.
So tl;dr version:
Searching just on song title can lead to mixed dates in albums
Title tracks don't return any date at all
Can the search use the album name if present instead of the song title?
Can it populate the full month, day, year fields if Google returns them?
Thanks, guys! And thank you KingSparta for suggesting this feature in the first place!
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Topic: New Option: Find Song(s) Date (Read 1651 times)