I thought I had this figured out after reading the forums and the documentation but I’m getting correct data in some instances and incorrect data in other instances and I don’t know if it is my script or the data. I’m going to assume it’s my script.
Essentially I’m trying to retrieve the Release Year of the media into the album title and the original first release year into the file name. For example, I have the 1996 release of The Yardbirds - Roger the Engineer, which I consider the release year. However, the songs were first released on Vinyl LP in 1966, which I consider the original release year.
What is the recommended methodology to get these appropriate dates?
The release year of the release (album) is available as $left(%date%,4) or $year(%date%)and the original release year is %originalyear%. Note that the %originalyear% is the year of the first release in that release group and not the first release date of the recording. If the recording was released earlier on, for example, a 45 rpm record, that date wouldn’t be used in the resulting %orginalyear% because it would be from a different release group.
I don’t think there is a way to get the original release year of a recording (looking at all release groups containing a release with that recording) unless someone has developed a plugin to provide the information.
EDIT: Reading the note in the documentation for the %originaldate% tag, the first release date of the recording is available as %_recording_firstreleasedate%, so the first release year of the recording would be $year(%_recording_firstreleasedate%).
That is exactly what I had read in the documentation. And I was using %_recording_firstreleasedate% for the earliest release, assuming it exists in the musicbrainz database. However, it does not seem to work, or I am misunderstanding the documentation or the the name is just misleading.
In the Yardbirds example I stated, I have selected the 1996 release of an album that was initially released in 1966. Both releases are in the musicbrainz data. Below are the results:
The documentation says that %_recording_firstreleasedate% is “The date of the earliest recording for a track in the format YYYY-MM-DD”. But this does not seem to be correct or is there a bug?
Assuming that your copy of the release is https://musicbrainz.org/release/d9fa23a1-c3dc-477e-a46b-e4c1c0c5d5b3 then looking at the tracks, I see that the recordings are only linked to this one release. See https://musicbrainz.org/recording/2734a045-bb19-415b-99dd-18cdf6f1fe2c for example. The %_recording_firstreleasedate% variable is returning the release date of the earliest release attached to this recording. In this case, since it is only attached to the one (1996) release that is the date returned. This is why the %_recording_firstreleasedate% variable does not show the 1966 date.
If the recordings linked to the 1996 release are the same as the ones linked to the 1966 release (which I suspect they are), then the recordings should be merged. Once the merge edit goes through, then the %_recording_firstreleasedate% variable would return “1966-08-08” as expected.
The release date for the only release attached to the recording has been entered as “1996” (with no month or day specified) so this is why only the year is being returned in the %_recording_firstreleasedate% variable, even though the format is “YYYY-MM-DD”. There simply isn’t any “MM-DD” information available to return.
Ideally (assuming the relationships have all been entered correctly), I think what you’re actually looking for is the earliest release date of any release that contains a recording linked to the work that is linked to the recording in the release that you are processing. I am not aware of this being available other than by using a plugin, and I don’t know for sure whether there is a plugin currently available that provides this information. The only one that I can think of that might handle this is “Classical Extras” by @MetaTunes but I don’t use the plugin myself so am not really familiar with it.