Author Topic: Date storage in tags  (Read 1133 times)

Bee-liever

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I know MB changes the displayed date format reliant on your system settings, but in what format is the date in the tags.
I use my desktop as my main platform for editing and adding music to my collection stored on my server.
This uses European format dd/mm/yyyy.
I'm going to change my laptop to ISO 8601 (yyyy-mm-dd) for international compliance.

Will the tracks synched from server to laptop need to have the date tags re-saved or will MB be able to read the tags saved in dd/mm/yyyy format and display them as yyyy-mm-dd
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Bee-liever

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Hmmm.  Just checked a couple of files with hex editor and it looks like TDRC/ID3 and DATE/Vorbis are encoded "as is" from the system.
I'm not hopeful about not having to recode the tags, but I'll wait to hear from Steven.   :-\
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Steven

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Dates are stored as strings as-entered except for mp3 files with id3v2.3 where the year is parsed (if successfully date parsed) and split to 2 tags, and when read from files parsed and combined.
Also the field is parsed for: Year (yyyy) and for date operations

I dont have time to try whether changing the computer date format to yyyy-mm-dd would be able to successfully parse dates stored as dd/mm/yyyy
It will probably be ok for id3v2.3 tagged files but for all other formats probably not.
Last Edit: May 01, 2022, 06:37:52 AM by psychoadept

Bee-liever

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I use id3v2.4 but I'll go ahead and make the change on the laptop and see what happens.
I suppose that's why the id3 standard is to store dates in the ISO 8601 format for just such contingencies.  :-X
I'll report back what happens.
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Bee-liever

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Sates are stored as strings as-entered except for mp3 files with id3v2.3 where the year is parsed (if successfully date parsed) and split to 2 tags, and when read from files parsed and combined.
Also the field is parsed for: Year (yyyy) and for date operations
The files are not read; parsed and combined correctly.
Take the date 2021-03-11 ie 3rd March 2021
The Date is stored correctly as 0311 but with $Date operations is ends up combined as 2021-11-03.
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Bee-liever

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The files are not read; parsed and combined correctly.
Take the date 2021-03-11 ie 3rd March 2021
The Date is stored correctly as 0311 but with $Date operations is ends up combined as 2021-11-03.
My mistake.  All wrong.

$Date function is working correctly but MB can't parse those strings saved "as entered".

Can work around this by setting up an auto-applied ASR to strip out the extended date info in the year tag and change the formatting of $Date virtual tags on the laptop.
Thanks for the point in the right direction Steven  :)
MusicBee and my library - Making bee-utiful music together