Author Topic: Musicbee's handling of year format in tags  (Read 9986 times)

S-Man

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This is a major annoyance and completely ruins my Musicbee experience.

I have the year tags of my mp3s formatted as YYYY-MM-DD, as well as the Episode Date tag (used as Release Date in iTunes).
Musicbee is set to write ID3v2.4 tags as well as ID3v1

Whenever I update a tag of a file with the year tag formatted as YYYY-MM-DD Musicbee does the following:
Changes Year (TDRC) tag to (D)D-(M)M-YYYY (e.g. 1-11-2010 or 14-2-2007)
Adds another Year (TYER) tag to the file
Adds a Date tag (TDAT) tag to the file
Changes Episode Date (TDRL) to (D)D-(M)M-YYYY 00:00 (e.g. 1-11-2010 00:00 or 14-2-2007 00:00)

Why on earth does Musicbee feel inclined to update all these tags even if I don't alter any of them, but only for example the comment field?

Please, for the love of God. Can you change this so Musicbee respects the original year handling and used tags of the file?

I just want my TDRC and TDRL to stay in the DD-MM-YYYY (e.g. 2013-04-08) without having it being updated whenever I update any other tag of one of my music files.

On a related note, how can you change that year in the sorting fields etc. also is being displayed in the YYYY-MM-DD format instead of the very annoying (D)D-(M)M-YYYY format?

I'm using Musicbee version 2.3.5082.
Last Edit: December 10, 2013, 02:42:29 PM by S-Man

redwing

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So what's your Windows' short date format setting? I'm sure MB uses the setting.

psychoadept

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You can create a virtual tag with the $Date function to display the year in whatever format you want. 
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S-Man

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So what's your Windows' short date format setting? I'm sure MB uses the setting.
It's set to D-M-Y that's correct. Still, I don't see why Musicbee should use that setting rather than just displaying the dates as they are formatted in the ID3 tags.

Moreover, why does Musicbee feel the need to update tag fields which aren't being edited in the tag editor window?
Last Edit: December 10, 2013, 06:12:00 PM by S-Man

S-Man

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I've had a little search around the forum and it seems this problem has been discussed before.

http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=2552.msg13133#msg13133

In this topic Steven says he would make a change to preserve the original year format if it differs from the Windows regional settings. So why doesn't this work in Musicbee 2.3?

S-Man

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You can create a virtual tag with the $Date function to display the year in whatever format you want.  
This doesn´t change the way the tags are written though, right? I'll get problems within other programmes when it writes the date as dd-mm-yy hh:mm

So what's your Windows' short date format setting? I'm sure MB uses the setting.
Since there´s no solution to this I had to resort to changing the short date format setting in Windows, but even this doesn't seem to make a difference.
I´ve set it to 2014-01-03 now and still Musicbee shows the date formatted as 1-1-2014.

Please, can anybody help me out?

psychoadept

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You can create a virtual tag with the $Date function to display the year in whatever format you want.  
This doesn´t change the way the tags are written though, right? I'll get problems within other programmes when it writes the date as dd-mm-yy hh:mm

No, a virtual tag won't affect anything written in the file.  Details on the function are here: http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Function#Date.

As an example, I use "$Date(<Year>,yyyy-MM-dd)" in one of my naming templates, because I wanted the files to be ordered by date.
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S-Man

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Little update; When I rescan all the files when the short date setting in Windows is set to yyyy-mm-dd it does show the dates like e..g 2013-01-04.

So I thought, great. Now Musicbee has picked this up. I change back to d-m-yyyy again, but if I add a new track to the library the year tag will show up in the d-m-yyyy format (e.g. 4-1-2013) again in the file/tag window as well as in the main browser.

I just want Musicbee to display the year tags as they are formatted within the tag field, ignoring the Windows date settings, as well as respecting the original date format when updating a track's tags.

Bee-liever

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the TYER and TDAT tags are a different issue altogether. It's because you are also writing ID3v1 tags. Up until ID3v2.3 the date and year was written in these two separate tags, only changing to a combined tag in ID3v2.4
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S-Man

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the TYER and TDAT tags are a different issue altogether. It's because you are also writing ID3v1 tags. Up until ID3v2.3 the date and year was written in these two separate tags, only changing to a combined tag in ID3v2.4
I'm only writing as ID3v2.4. The 'also save id3v1 tags' option is unchecked.

Bee-liever

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that's not what you said in your original post

I have the year tags of my mp3s formatted as YYYY-MM-DD, as well as the Episode Date tag (used as Release Date in iTunes).
Musicbee is set to write ID3v2.4 tags as well as ID3v1
MusicBee and my library - Making bee-utiful music together

S-Man

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that's not what you said in your original post

I have the year tags of my mp3s formatted as YYYY-MM-DD, as well as the Episode Date tag (used as Release Date in iTunes).
Musicbee is set to write ID3v2.4 tags as well as ID3v1

My bad. I've changed it hoping it would solve Musicbee´s erratic tagging behaviour but it doesn't.

J24

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Is there still no solution for this problem?
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