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[kstuart]

One of the annoying aspects of the "crowd sourcing" method used by all tag databases, is that most people who submit information put the "date of this edition's release" into the Date field.

So, for example, if they have the 40th Anniversary remastering of Miles Davis - Kind of Blue, they put "2009" into the Date field instead of "1959".

This is a bad idea because no one wants their media player to play "songs that were remastered in 2009", instead they want to hear "songs recorded in 1959".

Having said that, one does want to have both dates in the tags, because when a song from Kind of Blue pops up with Shuffle Play (for example), one might want to know which mastering it was.

So, what have you been doing when using MC, to deal with this situation ?

Is:

http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/File_Properties_%28tags%29

up to date (i.e. is "Date" the only date field that is saved back into the Audio file) ?

[MrC]

I use a Date Issued tag, which is just a string (vs. Date field), and use Date for the original album's release date.

Fields can be defined to store values in file tags.  See item 9 in the wiki page you reference.

That wiki page is very up to date, last edited Jan 3rd.  :-)

[kstuart]

Cool.

Maybe there should be a thread where each person gives details of their setup of Media Center (fields, views, options, etc.).

This would allow newbies to discover how to do things without having to start from scratch with each individual need.

[milehigh]

Search for this thread in 3rd party apps:

Track Year/Genre Lookup for Best of and Compilation albums

This worked really well for me for finding the orginal track year for many of my tracks - it isn't perfect and you have to do it in blocks (so your ip isn't banned by discogs).  Not sure if it still works (as maybe the interface has changed) but I find that I still use this to update tags with external data - as you can export a list of files as csv from MC - import them with excel to this spreadsheet - change or add data, then export to MPL and import back into MC with updated data.

Hope this helps.

[kstuart]

I just realized that with Classical, there is a third possibility - Date Composed.

So, you might have a Beethoven work that was composed in 1804 (and you might want to list or search for works that were composed in a certain time period), and was performed in 1959 and then was issued on CD in 1989 and remastered in 2004.

So, the Date Composed, Date Performed (or recorded), and Date Released would be three different things (and again, the Date Released - which you see often used as Date in online databases - is important, but is also the least helpful as the one "Date" tag).

[MrC]

Good points.  Keep in mind that Date is used by MC in a couple of default ways, one built-in being the Album header for Group By grouping in file lists.  But most of the defaults can be customized to use other date fields, so it is generally safe to use Date for your chosen purposes.