Album date vs original date.

[GSV3MiaC]

Can I put in a plea for some way to swap 'original date' (a detailed field) and 'album date' (which is often the remastering date, or the release date, or whatever Amazon thinks is the right answer if you auto tag from there).

'release date' of the remastered CD may be of some interest to someone somewhere, but if I'm using the date field for anything (selection, sorting, etc.) I figure it's much more likely to be the original release data that I care about, not whether the CD is a 1994 or 2002 pressing.

[mjs93]

Absolutely, I would like this as well.

[RHVC]

This is something I would like as well. Now I use MM along with MP3.com, Discogs.com, as well as Gracenote to find the original date of the recording. I like to make plays lists from a specific time, like 1977 music form High School, or early 80's ship board time...

[Bluzz]

I think this would be second on my wish list (after podcasting) as I too like to compose playlists based on original release year.

Robin

[psyXonova]

But the "Original Date" field is allready in MM....

[pah68]

But the "Original Date" field is allready in MM....

Yeah....what he said.

[rk]

But you can't even put the "orignal year" as column to the lists. That's why I put the "original date" (the date when the song was recorded) into the "year" field (where I would put normally the date when the album/compilation was recorded).

I think the "original date" is more important cause you want to know from which year the song is (and make playlists from that info) and not from which year the compilation is (e.g. "Best of the 70's" made in 2002).

[labyrinth]

Yes, has the ability to completely customize the columns been implemented? I would very much like to put the original year field as my column instead of the release year.

There are many other fields I would like to use as my columns depending on the task at hand--I would like to be able to see composers at a glance, as well as any of the id3 tag fields.

I know I can still work with these fields, but being able to customize them into the columns however I want for my specific task would be ideal.

[Montauk6]

Can I put in a plea for some way to swap 'original date' (a detailed field) and 'album date' (which is often the remastering date, or the release date, or whatever Amazon thinks is the right answer if you auto tag from there).

'release date' of the remastered CD may be of some interest to someone somewhere, but if I'm using the date field for anything (selection, sorting, etc.) I figure it's much more likely to be the original release data that I care about, not whether the CD is a 1994 or 2002 pressing.

I totally agree. But I think the fault is indeed more with Amazon than MM. I notice, for example, that they list "With The Beatles" (the Fab Four's second UK release) with an original release date of 2000, when most people know that this is a 1963 album.

The problem is there's no mega-central database that keeps all original date info for all artists. Even Allmusic sometimes falls short; many times they list albums with zero detail. You often have to find this stuff on specialized artist tribute sites.

[jc836]

What I think is a better solution is to have 2 columns available next to each other. The first6 being the SONG release year and the second the ALBUM year. The latter would be based on the currently available Gracenote/Amazon/etc Auto tagging sources, while the first is USER insertable. This has been part of my method. I also use the Comment field under properties.
As an example: I have almost the entire Billboard Top Rock 'n' Roll Hits series. These have a release date of ~1999, when in fact the songs are from very specific years. Amazon says 1999, but the album cover offered says 19xx (63 for example). My solution for now is to change the date shown after the ripping is finalized-works fine but does not complete the database.
All compilations (albums from various artists or 1 artist over a number of years) will suffer from the question posed.
Yes-MM does offer Custom fields, but this is something that should be there anyway in my opinion

[Teknojnky]

http://musicbrainz.org is pretty good for finding out original release dates.