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More => Old Versions => Media Jukebox => Topic started by: maggior on September 17, 2009, 08:54:20 am

Title: Howto write date tag with only year, not yyyy-mm-dd
Post by: maggior on September 17, 2009, 08:54:20 am

I'm a new user of the jukebox software.  It took me a little getting used to, but now I really like it.  I love the smart playlist capability and the ease at which playlists can be built.

I'm trying to move to this as my single tool for managing my FLAC music library files.  I've run into one problem which I hope you can help with.

When I retag files based on the file name and directories (which have the form genre\artist\(year)album\track# track_name.flac), the date tag has the form yyyy-mm-dd.

Where this becomes a problem is when I use another tool to convert these files to mp3 (either foobar2000 or dbPowerAmp), the resulting file is in a directory where the year is in the yyyy-mm-dd format.  I then have to go and edit the directory name, which is irritating.  I use another tool to do this because I use another machine to do my mp3 conversions.  I run Jukebox on my laptop.

I've tried specifying [date](year) in the specifier for how the tags should be written, but it hasn't helped.

How can I force the date tag to only be written as the year?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Rich

Title: Re: Howto write date tag with only year, not yyyy-mm-dd
Post by: JimH on September 17, 2009, 09:06:18 am

Did you try [year] ? 

Title: Re: Howto write date tag with only year, not yyyy-mm-dd
Post by: Alex B on September 18, 2009, 06:09:08 pm

Actually it is a small bug in the FLAC plug-in code that was used in MC12 and MJ12. Unfortunately there is no way to make MJ12 to write a plain year value without the mm-dd part. The problem was fixed in MC13.

If the files already have correct year values you can disable tag writing in the field specific settings. Then you can preserve the year values and still tag all other tag fields.

Tools > Options > Library & Folders > Standard Library Fields > Date > Edit This Field > untick: Store in file tags (when possible)

Title: Re: Howto write date tag with only year, not yyyy-mm-dd
Post by: maggior on September 18, 2009, 09:31:44 pm

Thank you all for your responses.

I tried [year] and it didn't work.  I had tried that before my post, but I wanted to try it again to make sure.

Alex - I'm glad to know it is a bug and I'm not just going crazy! :-).  The suggestion however isn't working.  I unticked this as you suggested.  However, it still writes data in the tag. 

For my experiment, I'm clearing all of the tags out of the FLAC file.  I then right click on the file from the "drives and devices" selection on the left.  I  select "library tools" and "fill in information from filename".  In the dialog box, I have "[genre]\[Artist]\([Date])[Album]" specified.  I click OK and it still is writing stuff to the YEAR tag in the file.

Did I miss something?

Thanks again!

Title: Re: Howto write date tag with only year, not yyyy-mm-dd
Post by: Alex B on September 19, 2009, 04:54:01 am

The date tag setting should have worked (it disables also tag removal, so maybe that is what you experienced), but I think I found a better solution that fixes the problem ...

EDIT

I removed a part of my reply because I can't host the file.

In general, I recommend trying MC14. In addition to many other new and better features it has improvements in the FLAC tagging system. (Its plug-in architecture is not anymore compatible with MJ12).

Title: Re: Howto write date tag with only year, not yyyy-mm-dd
Post by: maggior on September 19, 2009, 08:39:13 am

Hi Alex -

I used another program (the shell integration of dbPowerAmp) to remove the tags before rewriting them.  I also restarted MJ12 in case it was a setting read at startup time.  I must have done something wrong.

You are awesome!  Thanks for supplying a dll that may fix the problem.  I have downloaded it and will give it a try later when I have more time.

Thanks!!
Rich