Hello all. This post is about those unique and modern (ie. not original) “reissue” albums: deluxe edition, special edition, collector’s edition, anniversary, remaster, remix, box set (and perhaps a couple more I’m overlooking).
I believe “release type” is a different thing, covering releases such as soundtracks, demos, EPs, broadcasts, etc.
So if we call what I’m referring to as the “reissue type”, then what tags and variables would be the most likely to contain this reissue type information – so Picard could parse it and present it in a tidy way as part of an album folder name?
Of course there’s also the original and reissue dates to consider, but that seems much more straightforward than wrangling the reissue type itself.
It would certainly be nice to get a thorough and tidy output for these albums, like:[1983] Synchronicity [2024 Super Deluxe Edition]. Some or all of that folder name could then be used as the album title meta tag.
So far, I’ve noticed “discsubtitle”, “releasecomment”, “releasename”, “primaryreleasetype” and in some cases I suppose a reissue type could simply be part of the “album” title itself. I don’t know if there are others, which are the most populated or the most accurate, or if things are spread out and hard to nail down.
Has anyone else tried to tame this?
As a reissue (to me) is a release with a release year greater than the original release year.
If yes, I automatically append the release date in brackets to the album.
$if($eq($truncate(%originaldate%,4),$truncate(%date%,4)),%album%,%album% \($truncate(%date%,4)\))
(This is part of a larger script to set album, also dealing with other cases)
Your example release would be named like this: 1983 - Synchronicity (2024)
I found no method to handle all of your “reissue types” sufficiently. This information is not provided in a standardized form, so I decided to handle it manually. I add special code to the comment tag which I keep.
For example R{2024 Super Deluxe Edition}, extract what’s inside the brackets and write it to the album title instead of an automatically determined release year.
$if($rsearch(%comment%,R{),%album% \($rsearch(%comment%,R{\(.*\)})\),…)
or with square brackets:
$if($rsearch(%comment%,R{),%album% [$rsearch(%comment%,R{\(.*\)})],…)
I use R} because it’s very unlikely that it appears in other context. The round brackets around the actual content also need to be invalidated.
This would make the album tag look like this: Synchronicity [2024 Super Deluxe Edition]
But I need to enter this ETI manually to the comment / save / refresh to run the script with saved comment / and save again. I found no better way to do it.
Thanks for that. So the issue is indeed that there’s not been enough standardization.
Have you found any of those tags I mentioned somewhat useful for getting info on reissues, or some more useful than others in terms setting a priority?
The idea of manually something into the comment tag is a good one, as at least that stores it and standardizes it, and allows it to be used or moved elsewhere later. So you just do this in the bottom right pane then, before you hit save?
Brainstorming a bit, could you have a “second pass” script that then takes action(s) on that now populated comments field? So far in my journey with Picard, I’ve never really considered scripting anything other than a one-shot thing.
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I was never very interested in issues (regarding listening to music) and the reason I wanted to add the year to the title was to make it easier to distinguish between two releases of the same album, as I replace the date with the original date, therefore all have the same date.
But it wasn’t sufficient as I also own different releases from the same year. To solve this problem once and for all, I developed the R{free text} stored in the comment, which I specify manually if necessary. 
The function $copymerge copies new content to a multi-value tag avoiding duplication. The comment tag is multi-value.