Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[eric999]

I recently upgraded from MC 13 to MC16. Everything seemed to have gone smoothly until I noticed that the values shown in a custom tag I created (Date Recorded) haven been altered somehow.

I have both MC 13 and MC16 currently installed. When I open MC13 all of the dates I've entered in the Date Recorded tag show correctly in both the Action Window and Content Pane.

When I open MC16, the Date Recorded tag does not appear in the Action Window. All of the other tags in my copy of MC13 (both standard and custom tags I created) are there. The Date Recorded tag does appear in the Content Pane but the dates are all wrong. Many of the Date Recorded fields are empty and others show dates ranging from 3/27/1905 to 7/2/1905 with a handful of dates showing 2/22/2428.

One other thing I noticed, when I sort on the Date Recorded field in the Content Pane, MC 16 first lists a number of recordings with no value in the Date Recorded Tag, than the recordings with dates (from 1905 to 2428), than more recordings with no value in the field. Why are recordings with no date split - with some before and some after recordings with date values? 

Any ideas on why this has happened and what I should do to get my Date Recorded tag to appear in MC16?

Help.

[JimH]

Try changing the view to show all tags.  There are several dates.

In the Action Window for Tags, click on the little square in the upper left corner of the Action Window.

[Alex B]

Date Recorded is one of the new TV/video tags that were introduced in MC14. By default it does not show up in audio views.

It stores precise date & time stamps. The field values are stored internally in a locale independent format (the Date field uses the same format):

The Date field seems to be a day counter.

- the number 1 represents December 31st, 1899
- the current date is 39124 (February 11th, 2007)
- December 30th, 1899 would be zero but that is not possible with the used logic and MC doesn't accept this value.
- December 29th, 1899 and older dates use negative numbers starting from -1
- if only the year number is inserted in the Date field MC stores the date as January 1st of that year.


I tried to find a reason for the odd looking December 31th, 1899 date. Why isn't it January 1st, 1900? Looks like this is the explanation:

And finally, why 30 December 1899? Why not, say, 31 December 1899, or 1 January 1900 as the zero day? Actually, it turns out that this is to work around a bug in Lotus 1-2-3! The details are lost in the mists of time, but apparently Lotus 1-2-3 used this date format but their devs forgot that 1900 was not a leap year. Microsoft fixed this bug by moving day one back one day.

That blog explains some other date related oddities too.

The numbers after the dot are just digits after the decimal point. For example,
37808.5 results 7/6/2003 12:00 PM  and  39232.618055555555 results 5/30/2007 2:50 PM

MC uses the Windows locale information when it generates the displayed date format.


There is no easy way to fix your problem inside MC16.

I think your best option would be to move the field values in MC13 to some new custom field (select all > Tools > Library Tools > Move/Copy Fields...), create a new library backup file and restore it to MC16.