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