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[vagskal]

I am trying to make a smartlist that will find all album artists that have released more than one album in the same year. Any help would be appreciated.

The idea is to enter the full release date for those albums to get them to sort correctly. Any idea how I best can save the full date in the actual file tags when using ID3v2.3?

[vagskal]

I am trying to make a smartlist that will find all album artists that have released more than one album in the same year. Any help would be appreciated.

OK, I think I got it now after much testing:

Code: [Select]

~nodup=[Album],[Album Artist] ~sort=[Album] ~dup=[Album Artist],[Date] ~a

The idea is to enter the full release date for those albums to get them to sort correctly. Any idea how I best can save the full date in the actual file tags when using ID3v2.3?

I think I will use this expression to search for all albums with a more precise Date value than only the year in the MC (for albums released on an unknown date in January I am planning to use 0110 and not 0101):

Code: [Select]

-[Date (filename friendly)]="0101" -[Date]=[]
Then I think I will create a custom MC field, written to the ID3v2.3 file tags as a TXXX field, named Exact Date, or something like that, and populate that field for those albums by using this Excel like expression:

Code: [Select]

=[Date]
Any thoughts/recommendations regarding that?

(As far as I have been able to test, and search through the forums, it seems that the ID3v2.3 tag TDAT designated for this purpose is not supported by MC, which uses a JR/Date TXXX tag to store its internal date number. If someone could confirm that MC is actually capable of populating the Date MC field with the full date, i.e. 2009-12-10 for example, when importing a file with both a TYER tag of only 2009 and the TXXX JR/Date tag with the MC internal date number, which I am not able to decipher into a real date, I might consider skipping the step of manually setting a special field/tag for the full date in combination with a smartlist to check from time to time that the content of the Date and Exact Date fields is still the same. I want to be able to restore from the file tags all data I enter into MC in a human readable form. I guess an option to store the full date from the MC Date field in the TYER tag is out of the question for compatibility/compliance reasons...)

[Matt]

If someone could confirm that MC is actually capable of populating the Date MC field with the full date, i.e. 2009-12-10

Full dates are fully supported by our ID3v2 tagging code.

For ID3v2.3, we use TXXX(JR/Date) for a high precision date / time with a decimal days-since-1900 date.
For ID3v2.4, we use TDRC with an ISO-8601 date.

For ID3v2.3, TXXX(JR/Date) is only saved if it contains more information than TYER would contain alone.

[vagskal]

Thanks for the reply! I appreciate it.

Full dates are fully supported by our ID3v2 tagging code.

For ID3v2.3, we use TXXX(JR/Date) for a high precision date / time with a decimal days-since-1900 date.
For ID3v2.4, we use TDRC with an ISO-8601 date.

For ID3v2.3, TXXX(JR/Date) is only saved if it contains more information than TYER would contain alone.

Is the answer to the question if "MC is actually capable of populating the Date MC field with the full date, i.e. 2009-12-10 for example, when importing a file with both a TYER tag of only 2009 and the TXXX JR/Date tag" yes then? I.e. if I have the files with those file tags and MC, will I be able to restore the full date in MC.

(Sorry for being persistent but I am a bit anal about having all carefully entered info in MC also in the files should the MC database get corrupted or the software be discontinued, god forbid. I am not questioning the current handling of full date, which I think is logical and the best for compliance with other software; thanks J River and Alex B.)

[rick.ca]

This reminds me...When custom date fields were introduced, I thought it would be nice to upgrade some or all of my custom year fields (i.e., a four-digit string or integer) to proper date fields. One of those would be [Release]—which I too rely on for the correct sorting of an artist's albums. But there doesn't seem to be a function for creating a date number, nor do such fields convert properly if the field type is changed. Am I missing something, or is there a workaround?

[vagskal]

OK, I tried this out a bit more. A file with a TYER tag with only the year value and a TXXX JR/Date tag will fill the Date MC field with the full date (so will a file with only the XXX JR/Date tag) and I can populate a custom tag of string type with the expression =[Date] to get the full date in a file tag. Fine!

One caveat though: I thought my software for playback - Squeezebox server - supported the full date in the TYER tag and I started out using MP3Tag to fill the TYER tag with the full date. The full date from the TYER tag was, however, not imported into the MC Date field (only the year in compliance with the set standard) but if I changed a field in MC and saved the MC fields back to the file tags the full date was replaced by only the year (and no TXXX JR/Date tag if it was some other MC field than Date that had been changed). I hate it when I loose info from the file tags as it is written back to the files from a tagging/database software. Would it be too much to ask for this functionality in MC to avoid that situation: Populate the MC Date tag with the full date if the TYER file tags contains a valid date (and as now write only the year back to the TYER tag and combine it with a TXXX JR/Date tag; that way the user would not definitely loose any info from the file tags when updating the tags from the MC database). Another solution would of course be to populate the MC Date tag with the full date if the TYER file tag contains a valid date and write the full date to the TYER tag only if that tag already contained more than four characters/digits (or to update the file tags only for those corresponding MC fields which have changed).

@rick.ca: I have not used any custom date type fields yet so I cannot comment on your remarks. I have, however, considered changing my custom Trackyear MC field (representing the time when the music was played/recorded or, in the case of compilation albums, when it was originally released) from an (four digits) integer type field to a date type field, at least for some jazz recordings by prolific artists, so I would be interested in what issues you ran into. Finding the correct full release date for albums from the same artist released in the same year will keep me busy for a while though (including re-entering the full date release values I entered with MP3Tag...).