Tagging-Scripts: Remixes & Compilations: Best Dates Strategy? (Date-Variables/ID3-Frames)

MusicBrainz Picard
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Remixes and Compilations seem to “throw a spanner in the works”. From the few examples I’ve so far seen, it looks to me as if MusicBrainz treats them like fresh recordings. In that case I can imagine two work-arounds:

  • Either make my own custom TXXX frame e.g. TXXX: Description: RecordedYear Value: 1965, drawing its input from the Picard variable %_recording_firstreleasedate%.
  • Or instead first copy the %date% value into say TXXX: Description: MixReleaseDate then overwrite %date% with %_recording_firstreleasedate%

In practice, in both cases, I’d use $set(date,$if2(%_recording_firstreleasedate%,%originaldate%,%date%))
(as per the example in the manual).

The latter of the two suggestions best-matches my immediate use-case. But would this be “going off piste” (e.g. in a way that might “bite me back” later)?

Does it sound reasonable?

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They should be linked to the original recordings where it can be shown they are the same recording. This is sometimes too much work for the person adding the compilation release and they just make new recordings instead.

There were some threads on this kind of “best date” algorithms and progress is happening in Picard land. Trouble is it is hard to make a simple rule that “always works” as you will always have exceptions to a rule. There is always some level of manual checking going to be required.

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