a wish: <original year> mask

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Sire
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:08 am

a wish: <original year> mask

Post by Sire »

Hi, MM developers

Please add a link to this post to the official wish list.

I see that the original date field was introduced relatively recently in MM.
And it turned out to be a good idea, because of many new feature requests have been started from it, what means it's in demand.

Actually, this request was already been made in this post: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... ginal+date
But there it isn't clearly requested and is not explained at all.

--- What I want is to have <original year> mask for organizing purposes and I'll tell you why. ---

For instance, imagine two albums of Black Sabbath:
"[2004] Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and, say, "[1995] Forbidden",
the former being a remaster '2004, while original album was being released in 1974.
Assuming, both fields "Date" and "Original Date" are set properly,
I want them to be organized as follows:
".\[1974] Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"
".\[1995] Forbidden"

Why? With these things in mind:

1. The purpose of having a year in file name, in my opinion,
is to sort albums on a disk in order they were originally made;
and that's why I use "<year> <album>", not "<album> <year>" order.

2. Usually, the band's music style morphs smoothly while the time passes,
and to anyone looking into the band's album list it'd be natural to think that way;
say, if I'd listen the 1976's album and would seem to like it,
I'd check out 1975's and 1977's albums.

3. When I look for an album on a disk, I know approximately
the year of the original release, and it would be easier for me to find
the album if the year would be the original one ("1974") and not the remastered year.

4. It's also much easier to find duplicate albums when they have
the same directory names (so they override each other, what is easily detectable)
(imagine having 2-3 remastered versions and the original one!);
well, while the album and its remaster is not exactly two duplicates,
and anyone who _collects_ music instead of _listening_ it,
would surely want to have both albums, but I'm a listener.


The idea introduced in http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... ate#p20522 (which was to take <year> from "original date" field) should probably be the alternative solution, but it obviously has less flexibility.
mtenan

Re: a wish: <original year> mask

Post by mtenan »

I strongly concur with adding the Original Date (Year) as a mask. Sire's explanation and reasoning is identical to mine. With all the remastered albums available, it is important to differentiate the original CD version from later remastered versions.

I do hope MM will add this simple mask to those currently available.

Thanks Sire for raising this as a suggestion. I think it would be handy for many music collectors.
Mizery_Made
Posts: 2283
Joined: Tue Aug 29, 2006 1:09 pm
Location: Kansas City, Missouri, United States

Re: a wish: <original year> mask

Post by Mizery_Made »

This topic made me curious the other day and I got to toying around with Auto-Organize and ran across a bug that saw "<original date>" improperly implemented as a mask. (see bug here: 6094: Auto-organize: 'Added' and 'Original Date' behave strangely) You may be interested to know that this bug appears to be fixed in the latest test version (build 1281). While it's not an "<original year>" mask, it could still be used to fit your needs. The date masks output the full date entered (assuming you put release month and day in the field too) in the format of "YYYY-MM-DD" (or at least it does here.)

If you just enter the year, then you could simply make use of the "<original date>" mask, but if you use a full date, then you could use "<original year:4>" or "$left(<original year>,4)" to limit it to the first four characters, thus only "YYYY" (in theory anyway). You could then combine this with some If statements to build a mask that outputs the Original Year where needed.

Hope this does the trick for you, when 3.1.2 is officially released or you decide to risk using the testing versions.
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