Original Release Date: Skip "Promotion" releases?

MusicBrainz Picard
1

On tagging with Picard the release with the oldest release date will be used as “Original Release Date”.

Wouldn’t it be better to skip Promotion releases here?

I’ve checked/retagged some of my files and I get a new “Original Release Date” for Springsteen’s Greatest Hits.


I saw, there was a new promotion promotional release added.
It’s not a big thing to have a difference of a few days but if also the year changes, this is not very fine.
3 Likes
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IMHO it would make sense to exclude both promotional and bootleg releases for the calculation of ther original release date. Unless the release group consists only of those types of course.

This is a change that would need to be agreed upon and implemented in MB server.

6 Likes
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Let’s see…

There are several releases that were first bootlegs and then later officialised, like this one in 90 then 2017.

Maybe we should use earliest official date in official view and earliest date in full view.

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That wouldn’t help with Picard, though. It might take something like an extra variable for first official release date.

1 Like
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Woops sorry, I have no opinion, then. :wink:

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I suggest a new option, similar to the options for which coverart to chose, where you simply check the “ignore promotional/bootleg releases earliest date” or similar.

This’ll require a patch to picard but should be fairly possible?

1 Like
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It would be possible, but it would require an additional request per album to load all releases in the release group (meaning 1 extra second load time per album). Currently the original release date is calculated server side, and I would prefer to keep it that way. So this would require a server patch.

What I could imagine is a Picard plugin to handle this, then people who want to have only specific releases considered could choose to activate the plugin.

2 Likes
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I think it’s good to keep it server-side.
Nevertheless I think most people expect the original date to be the first official release date (i.e. not including promo and bootlegs).
Maybe it would be fine to have an additional (optional) input argument to specify if only official releases should be included in the calculation. Or maybe it is possible to have also the first official release date in the result.

It’s not a big issue, of course, but maybe it’s worth to think about a way to handle it in a future release.

BTW: I think the original release date will get better support by media players (e.g. Kodi) in the future and so it might be good to have it “correct” (okay, it’s hard to say what correct is, for me it’s more the official date).

1 Like
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Another idea: Automatically inferred release date also does not work well in cases were we don’t have info on the original release. Yes, ideally a release should be added for this. But maybe it would make sense to have the original release date being an attribute of the release group, with a checkbox to infer it automatically.

By default “Infer original date from earliest release” would be enabled. But it could be disabled and the original date be edited manually. And this could be done in addition to excluding promo / bootleg releases from the automatic calculation.

3 Likes
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Would it be better to do it the other way around?

e.g. a checkbox to include promo/bootleg