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[Spike1000]

Typically used for compilation albums. . .


(note: lots of edits as I now know "Date (release)" is not the field to use for this)

I've been looking into to populating the recently added "Date (release)" field in my MC Library.

I've been playing with (ie creating) Smartlists. I use JRiver more like a 'radio station' rather than a CD player; by that I mean I tend to listen to a number of tracks from a playlist (including random, genre or artist based) rather than a specific album in track order.

I'd like to make some year/decade related playlists, but the only 'Date' I have populated is the normal 'Date' field in MC which is the date an album was released; this is no use for my compilation albums where the actual track release dates don't match the compilation album release date. Hence my need to populate the "Date (release)"  a suitable date field on a track by track basis.

I've been looking into this over the last week and to be honest the whole thing is a nightmare!  Different audio file formats support different tags and as do different standards (ID3 2.3 Vs ID3 2.4). My ripping software (dbPowerAmp) doesn't populate any "Date (release)" suitable field so I need to add another step into my workflow. I also have to deal with the 1,000s of tracks I've already ripped 

What are people doing to automate the process of populating the "Date (release)" a suitable date field for new as well as existing tracks?

I've been looking at MusicBrainz Picard. It will do the trick, but it looks like I'll have to re-tag my entire collection album by album as it's not matching some of my older MP3 albums very well. It also wants to update multiple fields by default; this concerns me as verifying these changes will take many many days  (but would end up with a more consistent/accurate database but I'm not sure it's worth it at the moment)

Any tips/ideas for better automation out there?

Cheers

Spike

[blgentry]

I think I understand your request:  Individual songs in compilation albums have their dates set to the compilation date.  You want the date that the song originally came out.  Or it's individual date.

I don't have the answer for you unfortunately.  But I think my understanding of the date fields is different than yours.  My understanding is:

[Date] :  Original date that the song or album came out.   You might call this the recording date.
[Date (release)] : This is the date that a re-master or re-release of an album came out.  Like if you had several versions of Dark Side Of The Moon. This date would be the date of the re-release of those versions of DSotM.

Obviously, you can use and sort any field any way you want it.  I'm just writing because I was studying this recently and thought you might want to know.

Brian.

[ferday]

Please read here, it should help you understand where the date fields go, which may hint at auto populating possibilities

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=90199.0

The short version is that date and date (release) are standardized tags and should work across apps fine (TDRC and TDRL).  As blgentry said, I use date as original and date (release) as release date (say for the compilation or a remaster)

[Spike1000]

I think I understand your request:  Individual songs in compilation albums have their dates set to the compilation date.  You want the date that the song originally came out.  Or it's individual date.

Yes, absolutely! Much more succinctly put than my ramble 

[Date] :  Original date that the song or album came out.   You might call this the recording date.
[Date (release)] : This is the date that a re-master or re-release of an album came out.  Like if you had several versions of Dark Side Of The Moon. This date would be the date of the re-release of those versions of DSotM.

Ah, I see. I don't really have too many versions of the same album so hadn't really considered the need for a re-master or re-release date.

The thing is I don't see any other 'standard' field to hold date that the song originally came out for songs in compilation albums. . .   
I find this a little surprising, but it is what it is.

So I guess my question is "Is there an automated/easy way to populate a custom date field with the date that a song was originally released? (Typically this would only differ from the 'Date' field for compilation albums)"

I've created a custom field in MC that *does* get updated when tracks (both MP3 and FLAC) have been through MusicBrainz Picard, but there are some side effects I would have to undo (tracks become say 2/14 rather than just 02, and disc becomes 1/1 rather than 01) as I cannot appear to stop these being re-written. I would also have to semi-manually re-tag my entire library; this is a huge task 

Spike

[ferday]

The thing is I don't see any other 'standard' field to hold date that the song originally came out for songs in compilation albums. . .   
I find this a little surprising, but it is what it is.

So I guess my question is "Is there an automated/easy way to populate a custom date field with the date that a song was originally released? (Typically this would only differ from the 'Date' field for compilation albums)"

as i said, date is TDRC (recording time)
date (release) is TDRL (release time)

you could do it semi automated if you can successfully map those from whatever program you are using (they are ID3 compliant)

[Spike1000]

as i said, date is TDRC (recording time)
date (release) is TDRL (release time)

you could do it semi automated if you can successfully map those from whatever program you are using (they are ID3 compliant)

Ok, thanks for hammering that home to me. I get that now  It's taking me a while to pick my way through (and digest) all the permutations. . .  ?

What I'm seeing then is that for (dbpoweramp) rips of compilations the 'date' (TDRC) for each track is being set to the 'date (release)' (TDRL) of that particular album so it's not writing the information I need to any tags 

Further digging with MusicBrainz Picard is annoyingly showing me the same sort of thing, the 'date' (TDRC) of a track is most often being recorded as the 'date (release)' of the album.

So back to the drawing board to even find a source for the date the song originally came out. . .   

Spike

[ferday]

If you read the thread I linked, there was a lively discussion about just that

The problem is all the tag sources (all music, discogs, etc) consider the [date] TDRC as the date of release (or just the plain "date") which is why JRiver names the new tag date (release) TDRL, since the vast majority of the time for a non-remastered non-compilation album, we all want [date] to be the release date

The "easiest" way to start is type =[date] into the [date (release)] field for all your tracks (you can do them all at once).  This makes the release date the actual compilation release date...

Then comes the hard part of all the original track release dates to populate the original date ([date]) field. Personally for compilations I leave date=date (release) because I don't know if the track has been remastered for the compilation and as you know, it's a lot of manual work.  compliations that are soundtracks are the worst, because they often have a mix of new-for-the-compliation tracks mixed with old tracks

You could try mapping tags but I'm the wrong guy to ask about that...

[blgentry]

First, the approach to making this happen correctly:

My opinion is that you want the individual tracks original recording dates to be stored in the [Date] field.  Then, the date of the compilation belongs in [Date (release)], as that's the date of the "reissue", of that collection of songs.

Second, how to get those individual dates.  I played with MusicBrainz Picard for a few minutes and tried a couple of compilations.  By default, MBP found the release date of the compilation for each song.  NOT the original recording date.  I looked into plugins for MBP and found something called the LastFM Plus plugin.  Downloaded and installed it and ran it again.  That plugin added a new date field, but it was *also* set to the compilation date.

I read a little more and found this post, which seems to indicate that the data in MB is not song specific.  It's album specific.

http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?pid=29100#p29100

So, it appears to me that MB doesn't have the data you are looking for.  So how will you get that information?  That's a very good question and I don't have an answer.    You could certainly do it manually, but like you said, it would be a ton of work based on the number of tracks you have and no easy way to look them up.

Someone determined might be able to write something to automatically query allmusic.com and traverse the individual song links.  Hmm. 

Well, good luck on this one.  I hope you find a good solution.

Brian.

[Spike1000]

My opinion is that you want the individual tracks original recording dates to be stored in the [Date] field.  Then, the date of the compilation belongs in [Date (release)], as that's the date of the "reissue", of that collection of songs.

I read a little more and found this post, which seems to indicate that the data in MB is not song specific.  It's album specific.

http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?pid=29100#p29100

Someone determined might be able to write something to automatically query allmusic.com and traverse the individual song links.  Hmm. 

I found that very link late last night (time zone differences) but hadn't had time to report back. Thank you for your investigations. Googling has shown that the difficult question of 'original recording date' tagging is coming up quite a lot; maybe a music database will tackle that challenge in the next year or so. . .

So due to the lack of automation I'll just copy the 'Date' field into the currently empty 'Date(release)' (using ferday's tip) and then chip away manually editing the 'Date' for compilations as I see fit/get time. There are some easy wins eg albums from a specific year and I can 'cheat' on albums from a given decade by just setting the date to say something in the middle of the decade (say 1975) as it's 'close' and a quick win.


This has prompted another thought. . .
Can MC database fields be exported in some way (CSV?) then sections edited in say excel and commands built (again in say excel) to import the edited date fields for specific albums back into MC from the command line?

Why? I do this form of text/field manipulation all the time in my job and I could do some 'off line' MC database editing in my lunch hour. . . 

Thanks to everybody for their contributions to this thread.

Spike