New Album Year and Original Album Year Fields
Before SongKong 6.12 there were two date fields:
- Year
- Original Year
Original Year held the date of the earliest release the song could be found on, this could be an earlier version of the album the song had been matched to, or a completely different release such as a single. It was very useful for Various Artists compilation albums because it could store the release date of each song, whereas the Year field would by default store the date of the compilation album itself. But also for original albums the Original Year could store the earlier version of the album (e.g user has CD version but there was was an earlier Vinyl version), or because it is at song level some of the songs on the album may have earlier release dates if they were released as a single before the album. This means with the defaullt settings the Year field always had the same value for all songs on the release, but the Original Year field could vary for songs on the release.
One problem with this is if you enable the Format:Use Original Release Date option it stores the value of the Original Year field in the Year field. Then is useful because the Year field is the one displayed by most players and if you are more interested in the original release date of the song it would then be displayed. But one problem is if you rename your files and you use the Year field in the mask you can end up with files in different folders.
In SongKong 6.12 we have now added two more date fields:
- Album Year
- Original Album Year
The Album Year always stores the release date of the album that was matched to, so it is always consistent for all songs on an album, it will have the same value as the Year field would have if Use Original Release Date was not enabled. For this reason we have updated all rename masks that used Year to Album Year so folder/filename not split due to differing year values for songs
The Original Album Year field is a new field that stores the earliest version of the matched album, so for example if your songs are matched to a compilation this field will store the earliest version of that album. So like the Album Year all songs in an album should have the same value as each other for the Original Album Year field.
New Use Year instead of Full Date option
Although the date fields are named ********Year they will store a complete date if the information is available. But this level of detail is not always necessary and it maybe neater to only store the Year value in these fields. This can now be done by enabling the new Use Year instead of Full Date on the Format tab
Enabling this option means that all 4 fields will be modified to only store the Year value in subsequent runs of Fix Songs