IMO, even better than an average of the years would be if you could set it to the highest single year
Agreed, I actually thought that after posting but couldn't be bothered to change it...
I'm also wondering if it would be better to use a custom field for song date rather than album year, because the way I am doing it it now with a custom album year and putting song years in the date, it makes it so you can't use "Album (Year)" in your view schemes effectively.
Not sure what you mean here. The song year is the one I always want to be able to see and change. The album year I don't want to see, I just want to use it for sorting rules and view schemes etc, so have the Auto one for this. You could have the album year in the standard field, and have a Song Year field which you could just fill in yourself, but then you wouldn't be able to see this without either having two year columns visible, or using an automatic field which would be visible instead, but that would make it awkward if you want to change the year.
Ah actually after writing that I see you mean I think, referring to the standard 'Artist - Album (Year)' field which refers to the Year field. I actually use my own custom field instead of that one too, because I wanted panes to be sorted nicely. So, instead of using the Album field in Panes, I use my own 'Albums' field:
if(IsEqual([Album Artist (Auto)],/(Multiple Artists/)),[Album Artist (Auto)] - [Album],[Album Artist (auto)]if(IsEmpty([Album Year (Auto)]),,/ - [Album Year (Auto)])if(IsEqual([Artist],[Album]),,/ - [Album]))
So I get:
(Multiple Artists) - Pure Moods
Alanis Morissette - 1995 - Jagged Little Pill
Bob Dylan - 2007 - Dylan
Dire Straits - 1978
i.e.
Multiple Artist albums do not show a year: [Album Artist (Auto)] - [Album]
Standard albums show everything: [Album Artist (Auto)] - [Album Year (Auto)] - [Album]
Best of Albums (Dylan) show the album year: [Album Artist (Auto)] - [Album Year (Auto)] - [Album]
Self titled albums (Dire Straits) do not show the artist/album name twice: [Album Artist (Auto)] - [Album Year (Auto)]