Album/Track Date Tag

[staresy]

I've been trawling through my "Best Of" and compilation albums and setting the track dates to the actual date of the track recording/release rather than the release date of the compilation.

This is fine but when I view by album the albums are listed with a date in brackets eg. Muddy Waters - The Collection (1960). The tracks on this album range from 1951 to 1961, so where does the 1960 come from? Is there another tag somewhere that I need to edit, or is LMS clever enough to work out an average?

PS: I'm using material skin as the interface here.

[RobbH]

I've been trawling through my "Best Of" and compilation albums and setting the track dates to the actual date of the track recording/release rather than the release date of the compilation.

This is fine but when I view by album the albums are listed with a date in brackets eg. Muddy Waters - The Collection (1960). The tracks on this album range from 1951 to 1961, so where does the 1960 come from? Is there another tag somewhere that I need to edit, or is LMS clever enough to work out an average?

PS: I'm using material skin as the interface here.

I haven't tested this extensively, but a quick check of two compilation albums suggests that it takes the year from the final track on the album. This also seems to apply to embedded cover art.

[staresy]

I haven't tested this extensively, but a quick check of two compilation albums suggests that it takes the year from the final track on the album. This also seems to apply to embedded cover art.

Yes, that seems to be how it works, thanks.

[d6jg]

This is one of those issues that LMS on its own can’t solve. It’s a limitation of the commonly accepted tag structure.

If you were starting from scratch there would be more tags as standard and then the scanner in LMS could have made use of them.

There might be an INDEX tag for use when you want to place something in your library under something other than TRACKARTIST or ALBUMARTIST - an example might be if you wanted an album by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss to appear under Robert Plant, Alison Krauss as well as Robert Plant & Alison Krauss. Yes you can do this by multi tagging elsewhere but there are impacts with things such as MAI.

There could be ORIGINALYEAR and RELEASEYEAR instead of just YEAR and this could be extended to DATE instead of YEAR. At present if an artist has released 2 albums in the same year they are ordered by year then alphabetical which often results in a non chronological order.

However we have what we have and we are too far down the road to re-engineer the tagging structures available.

[prabbit]

In deference to the limitations of my beloved Squeezebox system and the desire, like the OP, to replace dates on tracks for Best Of-like albums, I went track by track and updated them. But that meant that I would lose the year the album was released. Not really a concern, but to capture that information I added AlbumYear=YYYY as a COMMENT. Is it ideal or a best practice? Probably not, my tracks show the correct year, making for better smart/year/decade mixes, and I have a searchable way to find the compilation's release year, in case some future solution presents itself.

[d6jg]

I fear any change is unlikely not because of LMS side but because 99% of online service users don’t really care about such things. Ok perhaps not 99% but certainly 90%.