How to get Picard writing the original release date / year of a recording?

[psychoadept]

Yes, there really needs to be a way to get dates for individual recordings if we want. I don’t know how accurate it is, but iTunes will tag compilation tracks with an original date. Sometimes I’ll rip a compilation with iTunes just so I can copy that info to the original date field before I do the rest of the tagging in Picard

[foxgrrl]

Picard needs to look up the original release date on the recording not on the album’s release group.

Right now %originalyear for a CD compilation of Buddy Holly’s music, will return something like 1996… which is when the compilation CD is released… but if you just look at any of the individual recordings…
for example:

That’ll Be the Day

Then it’s obviously listed, right there at the top of the list, 1957

That’s the year value we want to use to tag the recording/track in Picard.

The data is right there!

[outsidecontext]

@foxgrrl Please see my posting above for the issues this currently has from the perspective of Picard. It’s totally possible to write a plugin doing this, but depending on how thoroughly you want to check for the earliest date this would have a at least very heavy up to absolutely horrible impact on performance. But I would love to see a Plugin for this being implemented nevertheless.

In order for this to become an option in Picard itself the performance would need to be much better. This will only be possible if the server can provide an efficient way to retrieve this data.

[Dreamer8]

I requested something similar here:

Prefer lowest year option - MusicBrainz Picard - MetaBrainz Community Discourse

@outsidecontext

In theory it would be possible to write a plugin to query MusicBrainz for all releases containing a specific recording (or maybe work, depending on what you want) and that way find out the earliest release known to MB. But his would be really slow, since it would take multiple requests per track to get that data.

It’s not a problem if it would be slow, I need to do it just once for few hundreds of files, even hours would be OK.

BTW from the other topic, if I search for “Artist - Title” in google, it will (almost) always finds the video and release year and it’s the first release, correct - which database is google using?

Try it with any song. The only problem is, if the title has the same name as album, in this case the album is found, but the year is correct here too.

[Sophist]

Ok - here’s a few more gotchas on what constitutes a recording first release in MusicBranz.

1. Many almost-identical releases within a release group have different recordings in MusicBrainz despite the releases themselves using the exact same recordings. (I do not have any analysis of how common this is, but my personal anecdotal experiences suggest that it is widespread.) Equally some releases may be pointing to the same recordings, but are actually using re-recordings (which definitely should be different recordings in MB), or could be using re-masterings / remixes / simple edits of the original recording (should these be different recordings?).

So you cannot be sure that the date you get is actually the original release date for that artist / track.

2. Best of Albums may use a new MB recording object or may refer to (one of) the recording(s) of the original release.

3. You may get a Best of Album which uses a recording attributed to a NAT (single) release - and so the recording first release date on the Best of Album may actually pre-date the recording first release date on the original album.

4. At the moment, if you are using %originaldate% or %originalyear% (based on Release Group first release date) as part of the file naming path, at the moment all the tracks from the album are put in the same directory because the date is the same for all tracks and so all the tracks in the album are put in the same directory. If you start to use the recording first release date as original date and as part of the path, then different tracks can have different original dates, and you will need to explicitly change your file naming script to use a different variable containing the Release Group earliest release date otherwise you will get a different directory for each different original date on the album.

5. It may or may not be possible to get a more definitive first release date by looking at all the recordings attributed to a work. But this brings its own gotchas - what about cover versions by different artists (e.g. Johnny Cash - Ring of Fire), studio vs. live versions, recordings of the same song by e.g. Toyah (the band) and Toyah Willcox (the person) etc.

The bottom line is that there are a wide variety of different scenarios in the MB database, and this is more complicated that it may seem at first sight.

[boed]

So any progress on this? I really only want artist-title and original recording date for that artist for thousands of songs. I’d want to sort by music by date - e.g. 80’s music - not 80’s music remastered in 2016. I don’t really want Van Halen mixed in with Ray Blk or Rag’n’Bone Man.

[outsidecontext]

@boed

So any progress on this?

Original release date: Community opinion on how to handle the originaldate tag, first release date of release group and / or recording

Looking good. Thank you for this. Don’t take my points as negative, I just have head that sees holes. I like the way it is will be available to scripters first. This allows the geeks to give the code a kicking and find the holes before the impatient masses get at it. I have been merging a few Various Artists collections lately. It is noticeable that many editors who add the “100 greatest hits” collections are often the Hit n Run type editor. These are the…

[kevingnet]

Hi, I have/had the same issue and found nothing close to what I was looking for. I understand and respect the reasoning. However, for me it was more important to have my collection tagged with the oldest date for a recording, understanding that some will be incorrect and at some point I may have to correct manually. I can live with a small margin of error, so without further ado, here is a solution that worked for me. A buggy python script that I wrote from another example on the web.

You can run it per file script_name filename or
find ./ -type f -name ‘*.mp3’ -exec script_name ‘{}’ ;

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# Copyright (c) 2018 Kristofer Berggren
# All rights reserved.
#
# idntag is distributed under the MIT license, see LICENSE for details.

import acoustid
import argparse
import base64
import glob
import os
import re
import taglib
import time
import musicbrainzngs
from datetime import datetime

API_KEY = '1vOwZtEn'
SCORE_THRESH = 0.5

_matches = {}

def acoustid_matches(path):
    """Gets metadata for a file from Acoustid and populates the _matches.
    """
    print('\npath ', path)
    try:
        duration, fp = acoustid.fingerprint_file(path)
    except acoustid.FingerprintGenerationError as exc:
        print(u'fingerprinting of {0} failed: {1}',
                  path, exc)
        return None
    try:
        res = acoustid.lookup(API_KEY, fp, duration,
                              meta='recordings releases')
    except acoustid.AcoustidError as exc:
        print(u'fingerprint matching {0} failed: {1}',
                  path, exc)
        return None

    # Ensure the response is usable and parse it.
    if res['status'] != 'ok' or not res.get('results'):
        print(u'no match found')
        return None
    result = res['results'][0]  # Best match.
    if result['score'] < SCORE_THRESH:
        print(u'no results above threshold')
        return None

    # Get recording and releases from the result.
    if not result.get('recordings'):
        print(u'no recordings found')
        return None
    recording_ids = []
    release_ids = []
    for recording in result['recordings']:
        recording_ids.append(recording['id'])
        if 'releases' in recording:
            release_ids += [rel['id'] for rel in recording['releases']]

    _matches[path] = recording_ids, release_ids
def rate_limit(min_interval):
    try:
        sleep_duration = min_interval - (time.time() - rate_limit.last_timestamp)
    except AttributeError:
        sleep_duration = 0

    if sleep_duration > 0:
        time.sleep(sleep_duration)

    rate_limit.last_timestamp = time.time()

def calc_date(release_date, release_year):
    year = None
    dt = None
    rdt = release_date
    if len(rdt) == 4:
        dt = datetime.strptime(rdt, '%Y')
    elif len(rdt) == 7:
        dt = datetime.strptime(rdt, '%Y-%m')
    elif len(rdt) == 10:
        dt = datetime.strptime(rdt, '%Y-%m-%d')
    else:
        try:
            dt = datetime.strptime(rdt, '%Y-%m-%d')
        except:
            pass
    if dt:
        year = dt.year
        if year < release_year:
            release_year = year
            print("year: ", release_year)
    return release_year

def calc_older_date_from_acoustid(id, release_year):
    release = None
    try:
        result = musicbrainzngs.get_recording_by_id(id, includes=["releases"])
        if result:
            recording = result.get('recording')
            if recording:
                if 'release-list' in recording and len(recording['release-list']) > 0:
                    release = recording['release-list'][0]

    except musicbrainzngs.ResponseError as err:
        print("err ", err)
        if err.cause.code == 404:
            print("disc not found")
        else:
            print("received bad response from the MB server")

    if release and 'date' in release:
        release_year = calc_date(release['date'], release_year)
    return release_year

def identify_and_update(path):
    
    release_date = None
    dt = datetime.strptime('2200', '%Y')
    release_year = dt.year

    acoustid_matches(path)
    
    musicbrainzngs.set_useragent(
    "python-musicbrainz-ngs-example",
    "0.1",
    "https://github.com/alastair/python-musicbrainz-ngs/",)
    
    acoustIDs = None
    if path in _matches and len(_matches[path]) > 0 and len(_matches[path][0]) > 0:
        try:
            acoustIDs = _matches[path][0]
        except:
            pass
            
        if len(acoustIDs) == 0:
            print('acoustIDs NOT FOUND!!!')
            return False
            
        for id in acoustIDs:
            release_year = calc_older_date_from_acoustid(id, release_year)
    
        release_date = str(release_year)
    
    rate_limit(1.0/3.0)
    
    try:
        results = acoustid.match(base64.b64decode(b'Ym5jenB4cmtoOA=='), path)
    except acoustid.NoBackendError:
        print("FAIL : backend library not found")
        return False
    except acoustid.FingerprintGenerationError:
        print("FAIL : fingerprint generation error")
        return False
    except acoustid.WebServiceError as exc:
        print("FAIL : web service error (" + exc.message + ")")
        return False

    for score, rid, title, artist in results:
        song = taglib.File(path)
        #song.tags["ARTIST"] = [artist]
        #song.tags["TITLE"] = [title]
        #print("song.tags ", [song.tags])
        if release_date and release_date != '2200':
            if "DATE" in song.tags:
                if song.tags["DATE"][0] != release_date:
                    print("current YEAR ", song.tags["DATE"])
                    try:
                        song.tags["DATE"] = release_date
                    except:
                        pass

            if "ORIGINALYEAR" in song.tags:
                if song.tags["ORIGINALYEAR"][0] != release_date:
                    print("current ORIGINALYEAR ", song.tags["ORIGINALYEAR"])
                    try:
                        song.tags["ORIGINALYEAR"] = release_date
                    except:
                        pass
        try:
            song.save()
        except:
            pass

    if release_date:
        print("OK release_year: ", release_date)
    else:
        print("FAIL : no matches found")


def main():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog="idntag", description=
                                     "Find oldest release year and update track. "
                                     "This is so we can make play lists such as: "
                                     "60s, 70s, 80s, etc... ")
    parser.add_argument("-v", "--version", action='version', version='%(prog)s v1.03')
    parser.add_argument('path', nargs='+', help='path of a file or directory')
    args = parser.parse_args()

    abs_paths = [os.path.join(os.getcwd(), path) for path in args.path]
    paths = set()
    for path in abs_paths:
        if os.path.isfile(path):
            paths.add(path)
        elif os.path.isdir(path):
            abs_paths += glob.glob(path + '/*')

    for path in paths:
        identify_and_update(path)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

[kellnerd]

Hi, thank you for sharing your code with us.
Can you please format the code by putting ```python before the first line and ``` after the last line? Right now it is nearly impossible to read or copy your code as the forum software interpretes hash tags and indentation and replaces ASCII quotes by smart quotes.

Edit: Thanks to @outsidecontext who has already fixed the formatting.

[hiccup]

@hiccup

How can you get Picard to write a tag for the original release date of an album or a single?

Let’s take this Michael Jackson compilation album for an example:

musicbrainz.org

The Essential Michael Jackson

Official release by Michael Jackson, 2010

It contains the song ‘Ben’, which was released as a single in 1972.
It seems obvious and logical to me that you want to be able to have this reflected in your tagging scheme.

I think this thread deserves an epilogue.

WOW! So sometimes you can get what you want…

Thanks you-know-who-you-are and everybody else involved!
Sometimes a plan comes together (© The A-Team)

edit:
Even if it takes three years, damn, time flies.

[qq1984]

Hi hiccup, thank you very much for your epilogue, it sounds great to me.
Just bumped into this problem and saw that it was picked up by MB, but when I run Picard (2.6.2), I don’t see this field, nor is there a system variable %firstrelyear% in the scripting environment.
How did you pull this off?

[hiccup]

@qq1984

How did you pull this off?

For this you can use the new hidden tags:

_recording_firstreleasedate

and

_releasegroup_firstreleasedate

https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/variables/variables_basic.html

In this thread you can find an example of the script that I am using:

Original release date: Community opinion on how to handle the originaldate tag, first release date of release group and / or recording

[shamboni]

Will this pull the full date if there is a release/recording with the same year but no date? For instance let’s say the US version of an album is dated to 1973-09-17 but the European release is only dated to 1973. Which date will the variable pull?

[hiccup]

I think you will find answers on that here:

Original release date: Community opinion on how to handle the originaldate tag, first release date of release group and / or recording

We have some debate over at the code review to add support for per track original release date to Picard. This is a feature that is come up a couple of times here in the forums. Current versions of Picard use the first release date provided by the release group (the earliest release date of all the releases inside the group) to fill the originaldate tag. For many use cases this is fine. But it not always reflects the actual first release of each track. E.g. a compilation might have been release…

[qq1984]

Thank you very much hiccup! It works fine for me now
(fortunately didn’t have to wait for 3 years, like you)

[hiccup]

@qq1984

It works fine for me now
(fortunately didn’t have to wait for 3 years, like you)

Good to hear!

There are thousands of pieces of software and features that I never had to wait for, but other people had to.
Circle of life kind of thing.

[boomhaueruk]

Hi everyone.
I’ve been using Picard for a number of years, but this is my first delve into the world of scripts, as I’ve 100’s of compilations with the wrong year and need to batch change just the date to be, well, pretty much exactly what Hiccup is saying - the year of recording of that version of the track.

I’m on OSX 10.13, so I’m running Picard 2.6.3.
I’ve added the script “$if($gt($left(%_recording_firstreleasedate%,4),$get(origyear)),$set(firstrelyear,%origyear%),$set(firstrelyear,$left(%_recording_firstreleasedate%,4)))”

So I’d assumed what I’d do now is simply scan all the tracks and run the script.
Is that right?
I’ve set my preferences to ignore compilations when the files are scanned.

Also, is there an easy way to stop anything except the year tag being updated?
Everything else about the compilations is done…artist, album name, track name, album art…I literally only want to change the ‘year’ field.
(I’ve tested going in and selecting all fields except ‘Date’, ‘firstrelyear’, ‘Original Release Date’ and ‘Original Year’, then clicking ‘Use Original Values’ but it seems not to do anything and I can’t get some fields to keep originals; do I remove them? It looks like ‘remove’ means totally remove that field…)

Up to now I’ve used Picard just for tracks I have no data for, but if I can use it to do this job, it’d be amazing!

Thanks all for your work!

[rafapratas]

Hello good afternoon,
I’ve been looking for a long time on this topic, and I think the solution to what I’m looking for is right here: recording the oldest data of a song release. As I’m new to this area of ​​scripts, I would like to ask for help running this code. How should I proceed in Picard?
Thanks for the help in advance.

[Zas]

You can find explanations about plugins (and scripts) in Extending Picard — MusicBrainz Picard v2.8.1 documentation

That’s a good starting point.

[sound.and.vision]

Hi @rafapratas - welcome to the forum.

As I have this script working actively in my Picard configuration I will show you how to set it up.

Firstly I am expecting you to be running the latest version of Picard, click Help > Check for Update to confirm you are on the latest version:

Process:

1. With Picard Open click Options > Options to open the Options dialog window:
   

   

2. Click on Scripting from the left Tree Menu

3. Click Add new tagger script - It will create an entry called “My Script (1)”

4. Double click on My Script (1) and change the name to GetOldestDate

5. With GetOldestDate selected, copy the following into the right pane:

$set(date,$if2(%_recording_firstreleasedate%,%originaldate%,%date%))

6. Ensure Enable Tagger Script(s) is ticked and that GetOldesteDate is ticked too, your window should look similar to this:
   

   

7. Click “Make It So!” to save changes

Now find a track, the Date ID3 field should now take the earliest date for that recording.

(the example above is a CD compilation from 2003, but the song is from 1967, as you can see the Date field is set correctly)

Hope this helps