Tagging Year, Release Date, Original Release Year etc.

[mville]

How are you tagging dates for CD rips in flac and mp3? I would like some feedback on the best way to tag the numerous date tags and the numerous CD releases for an album (and there impact on the Illustrate suite of apps). e.g. does the YEAR tag contain the CD release date or the original album release date etc.

So, David Bowie - Aladdin Sane has the following (UK releases):

Originally released by RCA 13 April 1973
1st CD released by RCA 1984
Remastered CD released by EMI/Virgin 28 September 1999
30th Anniversary CD released by EMI/Virgin 26 May 2003

Which flac and mp3 tags would you populate for the 30th anniversary CD?

[TedSmith]

Re: Tagging Year, Release Date, Original Release Year etc.

FWIW I sort of gave up on dates: I try to keep ORIGINALDATE correct with the year, but I use too many sources for metadata and too many metadata editing programs to keep any other date information correct. Since I rarely search on dates this is fine by me. I do however keep MEDIA correct and this usually fills the gap (Vinyl, CD, DVDA, SACD, Digital Media, etc.) I have very few albums with multiple releases on the same media (I tend to give those "extra" CDs and SACDs away when I get duplicates.)

[BrodyBoy]

Re: Tagging Year, Release Date, Original Release Year etc.

I put the original album release date in the YEAR tag (which I expand to YYYY-MM). When applicable, I also use an ORIGYEAR tag that reflects the year the particular song was released. (This often applies to older collections where many of the songs were released individually, at different times. "Album," per se, is not a directly applicable concept for these early recordings.) This distinction is really just for informational purposes when I actively explore a song/album's metadata....it has no practical application in my everyday use.

To deal with those situations where I want to keep multiple masters of an album in my music library, which seems to happen more and more these days, I append the album title to distinguish them. For uniformity, I always use "RM"+YYYY in square brackets. So for example, my library may include both "Abbey Road" and "Abbey Road [RM2009]." (In fact it does!) This has turned out to be the best way, for me anyway, to keep the albums and their folders separate, and to easily identify the album variations when I'm playing the music.