Set songs to their original release date

[rush_fan]

I’m probably setting myself up for some unintended consequences, but I’m tired of songs being tagged with the year of the re-mastered CD instead of the song’s original release date.

I’d like to set SongKong or Jaikoz loose on my collection and have it set each and every song’s date to when it was first released either as a single or as part of the original album.

That way, if I want to create a 1977 playlist, for example, I can do so accurately and easily.

Has anyone done this? Or not done this because it’s a bad idea?

[paultaylor]

Hi, you have a few options:

1. Use the Original Year field for your playlists, songs aready matched to MusicBrainz by SongKong/Jaikoz should have this set to the earliest date found for the song.This will have no affect or anything else, if you run Status Report and then View As Spreadsheet you can easily have a look at the data you currently have.

2. If using Original Year is not feasible you can rerun Fix Songs but on the Album tab enable Use Original Release Date option for the Year field.

3. Alternatively you can use Scripter task to set Year to Original Year e.g year=originalyear

Options 2 & 3 should not be an issue unless you include Year in your file renaming script because now the year will not be consistent over all songs in an album and so would no longer be stored in the same folder.

[rush_fan]

Thanks. It looks like some matched albums in my collection have no Original Year. I investigated one of these at random and it looks like it had been matched to Discogs. That didn’t have an Original Year. When I forced an album match to MusicBrainz, I got Original Year plus a whole lot more that wasn’t there before.

Also, Strawberry Music Player may have some issues when you change the Year and/or Original Year from the outside (even after doing a full collection re-scan). Even though I know the tags are changed in the file, Strawberry continues to show the old years no matter what I do.

I dunno, with a library as large as mine this might not be worth it. I’m wondering if I should’ve only done MusicBrainz matches and left the Discogs stuff unchecked. I’ll keep messing around with it as time permits. Thanks again.

[paultaylor]

@rush_fan

Thanks. It looks like some matched albums in my collection have no Original Year . I investigated one of these at random and it looks like it had been matched to Discogs. That didn’t have an Original Year . When I forced an album match to MusicBrainz, I got Original Year plus a whole lot more that wasn’t there before.

Good point, we don’t currently work out orignal year for Discogs matches, we have an issue for this and I recently raised the priority of this.

So my Scripter option was a little too simplistic, it should be

if(originalyear.length>0)year=originalyear

What option did you use?

@rush_fan

I dunno, with a library as large as mine this might not be worth it. I’m wondering if I should’ve only done MusicBrainz matches and left the Discogs stuff unchecked. I’ll keep messing around with it as time permits. Thanks again.

I dont see why size is an issue.

Most of your matched albums will be found in MusicBrainz, but I dont think disabling Discogs is a good idea because that will find additional albums that could not be found in MusicBrainz. An identified album with no original_year field is better than an unidentified album

You say you found a match with MusicBrainz by forcing a match, maybe just need to rerun Fix Songs on your collection to update it with new data

I cannot help with Strawberry player, have no knowledge of it.

[rush_fan]

Interesting. Does SongKong favor one over the other, MusicBrainz vs. Discogs, if there’s a match on both?

Which option did I use… Strawberry supports Original Year so Option 1 is the plan. I use it to make all my playlists which then get sent off to Plex.

Are there any performance or other concerns running SongKong against 1000s of songs across an SMB share? I used to have SongKong running directly on my Synology (that’s actually how I discovered SongKong) but these days it’s running on my linux PC.

[paultaylor]

@rush_fan

Interesting. Does SongKong favor one over the other, MusicBrainz vs. Discogs, if there’s a match on both?

MusicBrainz is preferred over Discogs but you can match to both.

SongKong always searches for a MusicBrainz match first, if it finds one it updates your song from the MusicBrainz data. MusicBrainz may have already have a link to Discogs so it will then add any addtional data from Discogs, but it will only add data for empty fields not replace fields if matched to MusicBrainz.

If no match found to MusicBrainz it will then search for a Discogs release, if a match is found because there is no MusicBrainz match it can update fields or add new fields

@rush_fan

Which option did I use… Strawberry supports Original Year so Option 1 is the plan

Okay, it sounded like you had already done it, that is the best option if possible.

@rush_fan

Are there any performance or other concerns running SongKong against 1000s of songs across an SMB share? I used to have SongKong running directly on my Synology (that’s actually how I discovered SongKong) but these days it’s running on my linux PC.

Update songs over the network is definetly slower, how slow depends on how slow the network is. But also if there is enough room in the metadata section of the file to add in the modified data it can just rewrite the metadata section, but if there is not enough room and the audio data has to be moved then the whole file has to be rewritten.

If it was me I would try on linux, but if it seems to be struggling I would consider switching back to Synology, your license can be used on up to three installations

[rush_fan]

@paultaylor

MusicBrainz is preferred over Discogs but you can match to both.

SongKong always searches for a MusicBrainz match first, if it finds one it updates your song from the MusicBrainz data. MusicBrainz may have already have a link to Discogs so it will then add any addtional data from Discogs, but it will only add data for empty fields not replace fields if matched to MusicBrainz.

If no match found to MusicBrainz it will then search for a Discogs release, if a match is found because there is no MusicBrainz match it can update fields or add new fields

^ That’s great info and important to understand.

I’m back “on box” with Synology SongKong and love it. Seems like the web UI has been improved significantly since 2023. Either that or I just know my way around SongKong better.

Anyway, it looks like Strawberry’s “Original Year” is simply a duplicate of Year. As a test I did…

What Strawberry shows…

So that’s kind of a bummer. After fixing songs with “Use Original Release Date”…

I think I’ve got my plan in place then if I want to go through with this.

My main concern is I hit a multi-CD album that I’d skipped with SongKong because it wasn’t matching up correctly and getting mangled – it was matching, but matching with the wrong multi-CD entry. I remember having a few of those. So if you have any advice on how to avoid that I think I’m in good shape to proceed.

[paultaylor]

@rush_fan

My main concern is I hit a multi-CD album that I’d skipped with SongKong because it wasn’t matching up correctly and getting mangled – it was matching, but matching with the wrong multi-CD entry. I remember having a few of those. So if you have any advice on how to avoid that I think I’m in good shape to proceed.

I suggest you run Status Report on your collection, then look at the MusicBranz Inconsistencies tab, and then the Discs Missing tab it will show you MusicBrainz albums where some but not all discs have been matched (typically boxsets) then you could try fixing these up using Match to One Album task

[rush_fan]

Yep, I’ve got 10 albums that need attention. I like that report.

Just so I know, if I didn’t manually match them, would these options save me?

[paultaylor]

The first option should usually always be set otherwise albums can be broken up

The second option can be a bit restrictive because if you have some files missing from your drive this can prevent matching to the correct album.

Also, there is a difficulty with Box Sets. Because Box Sets are very large it is difficult to match the whole boxset, for example if just a couple of track lengths dont quite match the range, of if you are missing a disc. So we are a bit more flexible about Boxsets then usual releases ( defined as a multi disc album with 4 or more discs), we allow complete matches of a folder to a disc, so even if not all discs match or you have some discs missing it usually gets you most of the way there.

The simplest solution is probably to run Match to One Album for each of those ten release and see if the correct release is avaialable.

[rush_fan]

Just to close this out, here are my findings. This is for anyone else who’s having the same problem and hits this thread.

This has only been a problem with my FLAC files. It looks like Strawberry has issues with FLAC’s vorbis comments like ORIGINALDATE, ORIGINAL_YEAR, and/or ORIGYEAR. It seems to barf on those and simply falls back to DATE to populate its Original Date.

However, I noticed Strawberry’s Original Date field works fine with my Apple AAC files (ID3v2).

Back to SongKong, the brute force solution is to use the “Use Original Release Date” option. But I don’t want to do that because I like having a distinction between the release dates in the metadata. That’s the whole point of having four date tags instead of two and it’s a great idea.

So what am I going to do? Nothing except watch for a fix on the Strawberry side. I’ve been making playlists without an original date search for years (heck, I didn’t even know the tag existed before last week) and it won’t kill me to continue to do so.

[rush_fan]

I submitted a feature suggestion on the Strawberry side in the hopes of getting this fixed at some point.

Support for FLAC ORIGINALDATE, ORIGINAL_YEAR, and/or ORIGYEAR