I have come across one rare (soul) track that was recorded back in the 1960’s but only released a decade or so later. So for reflecting/grouping the sound of the music, I’d take more notice of the date of that actual recording, as opposed to the release.
I would guess at using %date% (=TDAT+TYER) for the date of recording and %originaldate% (=TORY) for the release. Not confident yet.
Does that sound reasonable?
For the first recording date there’s a variable _recording_firstreleasedate which you could use, but since there was no recording released in the 1960s, this is no solution. AFAIK there’s no way to get the actual recording date from MB. You have to manually add it, keep the date or write it to any tag from which you can use it in a script.
BTW (release) %date% and %originaldate% would be used for TDAT and TORY without scripting. (you always write it to a file, containing a certain track = a recording)
… maybe helpful, if you like a “customized” release date to your files:
$set(date,$if2($rsearch(%comment%,OD{\(.*\)}),%originaldate%))
In short: if you put a string OD{…} in your files’ comments (you have to “keep” them, if you “clear existing tags”), everything between the brackets will be written to “date”. If no such string is found in comment, the %originaldate% will be used instead.
$rsearch() returns what is written between the round brackets (round brackets have to be escaped with preceding back slash) and .* means everything - it should be a date or a year though. OD{ and } are delimiters. If you want to use multiple such strings (for other purposes), you have to be more specific what’s between the brackets or choose a unique delimiter for the end, e.g. }OD