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Track Year vs. Album Year

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ThomasB:
Unfortunately not.  :(

Actually I am using now the publishing year or the year when the last song was recorded if a sampler contains tracks from different years. Otherwise I would have several different albums in the "year-album" list for just one album which I don't like at all. Also the number of albums is then wrong. So the best is to avoid samplers at all or even identify a track from a sampler as "single" instead. I am still struggling with this issue.

It seems that nobody else is caring about. Actually the only one program I am aware of which supported all these features is no more supported any more (Catraxx). However, this program started originally as a database program for collectors and not as a "juke box" like the Media Center. That's the main difference. Nonetheless, the latest versions have been very powerful in terms of interaction between the database and the ID3 information down to very detailed information about everything and it was able to play music too. 

Sad story for serious record collectors.

Originally the problem was created because the ID3 tag was never intended to contain also album specific information. A compromise for the album artist versus the track artist was the invention of the "various artists" solution. However, a "various years" information wouldn't make sense at all.

 

stricko:
Mmmmm. I've raised it as a quick to do idea for mc21, but I'm not holding out much hope. It's not just sampler albums, but best ofs as well. Can't see how treating them as a single track would help though. I'm thinking about a user field (possibly a relational one) that if populated overrides the date on individual tracks in queries that use date to sequence albums. Not perfect, but should work.

ThomasB:
Well, that would mean to ignore the built-in functionality at all and invent a new custom field instead which would then contain the e.g. release date of the album instead of any year/track information. But that would also mean that you would have to do that for ALL of your albums and not only for your samplers and "best of" albums. In my case that would mean that I would have to reorganize and update more than 6.500 Albums manually by filling that newly generated field and then replace the sort order "year-album" by the new one. Right? Maybe the "copy field" functionality could eventually ease that task.
However I think it's a lot of work to search for all the more difficult samplers and "best of's" to reorganize them correctly again.
In any case that's more or less the only real annoying topic from my point of view. If and when I have too much spare time I'll consider something like that. At least I will think about.....
The only further issue I have also to consider is how that would eventually affect some other applications for my music files and also the analysis functionality of my mentioned other program which I still use for reporting and catalog functionalities. Actually I am not really in favor of custom fields due to compatibility issues. But maybe I am confusing myself a little bit now.
Thanks anyway for the hint.  

stricko:
ThomasB, I'm also very wary of adding fields, but I think you might have missed a trick in what I said.

The new custom field would only overide the date - if populated. So it would only need to be added / maintained for those albums / tracks needing special handling. So for the vast majority of my music, I'd never have to populate it or worry about maintaining it. Even a lot of my compilation albums are single year, so no aditional work.

One note of explanation though, which might help. My version of MC is configured primarily to work under Theatre View, so I'm using Expressions in the Theater View queries to hide a lot of the complexity. I'm not sure how well this approach would work under normal view.

Based on this conversation, and a bit more thinking, I took another look at my stuff. The biggest issue by far was for various artist compilations. So as a short term fix, I excluded the date from how such albums are grouped under Artist / Albums. Remembering that all this is under Theatre View, I already had an expression for Album in the query. Previously this just used [Year - Album] to group, and [Album] to display. I've now changed this to

if(isequal([album artist], various artists, 1), [album], [year - Album])

This just ignores the year for grouping any album by Various Artists. A quick fix, not requiring any any additional fields, which solved the worst of what I was seeing.

Obviously doesn't fix the single artist compilation artist dilemma, but I'll keep thinking about that one.

Hope this helps.

squeedle:
Still want this feature.

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