Original Year of an album

Users of MPFreaker exchange tips and comments.
Post Reply
paulscrivens
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Sep 11, 2008 1:43 am
Location: London

Original Year of an album

Post by paulscrivens » Thu Sep 11, 2008 1:51 am

Hi,

A useful feature for us anal/ocd music librarians would be an option to tag songs with the original release year of an album.

Popular CD's are often rereleased over a period of years. If I create a smart playlist of all songs from the late 70's I'm going to miss those tracks which belong to an album rereleased in the 90's.

... and for compilation albums, it would be sensible to tag the release date of each indivual song.

Surely there is a song database in the ever expanding ether containing this data?

I've searched the web and forums for this, but seems this is still a very manual task... seems most people are using allmusic.com as a reference.
User avatar
beastie
Posts: 443
Joined: Sun Apr 25, 2004 6:51 am
Contact:

Post by beastie » Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:18 am

A useful feature for us anal/ocd music librarians would be an option to tag songs with the original release year of an album.
You can do this with MPFreaker, though it isn't 100% accurate by any means. Simply select Overwrite for Year, and ensure that Album is set to Oldest (no Overwrite necessary for it, though). This will usually get a value from discogs.com which is pretty reliable. If you don't get a year that looks reasonable, you can turn on "Deep search" and try again.
... and for compilation albums, it would be sensible to tag the release date of each indivual song.
Alas, this is something MPFreaker doesn't do, and is not likely to do in the future. Personally, I see compilation albums as pre-iTunes playlists anyway -- so, sometimes I'll convert a compilation into a playlist: make the playlist, turn off the "Compilation" flag for the tracks, then let MPFreaker overwrite most of the data for each constituent track so I can see not only the original release date, but original release album.

allmusic.com and discogs.com are indeed both great for manual reference.

Leon
paulscrivens
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Sep 11, 2008 1:43 am
Location: London

Post by paulscrivens » Mon Apr 13, 2009 3:10 pm

I like your idea of overwriting compilation albums with their original album.

I'm in the middle of manually checking my 20k music library (halfway through). Once I'm finished, I'll:

1) run my entire library through mpfreaker to fetch the original year and genre (the year is pretty accurate already - but just in case) (genre field is a mess)
2) run my 'compilation albums' though mpfreaker to retag songs to the their original album
3) delete duplicates.
Post Reply