Sorting multiple-year albums by year like iTunes.

[tanahata]

I'd like to sort albums by "album's year" like iTunes, not by "each songs' year".

Some compilation albums have multiple-year songs so that "sort by year" divides one album into many parts.
I'd like to sort albums by album's year automatically without additional tags like iTunes.

Thank you

[Anti]

How could that be done 'without additional tags'?
What's wrong with using a custom tag in MB?

[Steven]

it could be handled the same way as date modified, date added are handled where in the Album and Tracks layout it uses the maximum value of all tracks in the album so the tracks stay together.

edit:
having said this, i am not sure everyone would agree with the proposed behavior

[Diederik]

A change to the way MusicBee handles years isn't necessary in my opinion. The desired function can already be achieved with a custom-virtual tag combination. Letting MusicBee automatically group years together would take away some of the freedom it currently offers, which would be a shame. Besides that, who is to say the highest years among the individual tracks is also the desired year for the entire compilation.

To create the desired effect, a custom tag would need to be created, which should either contain the year of the individual track, or the year of the compilation album. You could for example use Original Year for this purpose, from the custom tags drop-down list. For sorting you could then create a virtual tag which reads the custom tag for compilations and the Year tag for other albums.

[Anti]

I agree. This looks to me like a new user moving over from iTunes, who
doesn't know about custom/virtual tags or custom views/sorting yet?

[KissCool]

iTunes do not have an album' year and a song' year.
The iTunes store only use the "©day" atom for the album release date. So, the "year" column (what you're calling "song's year") and the "Release Date" one (what you're calling "album's year") come from the same atom.

There's just a bug: when you update the "Year" field in iTunes, iTunes write it in "©day" atom and update the "year" column but not the database entry for the "Release Date" column. Just delete the track/album from iTunes and import it again: the "Release Date" column is now blank and you can't achieve what you're doing anymore, even with iTunes itself.

So what you're asking is like asking to implement an iTunes bug in MusicBee.

[tanahata]

Thank you for discussing this topic.
I know that there are diverse views.

So I don’t want behavior I proposed become default, however I still want to one options that sorting multiple-year albums by year like iTunes.
When we search some compilation albums, current sorting is very complex and I think this is not desirable.
Even if sort by date is selected, I don’t want separate some albums as long as the albums are grouped by album-artists and album-name.

[Diederik]

Thank you for discussing this topic.
I know that there are diverse views.

So I don’t want behavior I proposed become default, however I still want to one options that sorting multiple-year albums by year like iTunes.
When we search some compilation albums, current sorting is very complex and I think this is not desirable.
Even if sort by date is selected, I don’t want separate some albums as long as the albums are grouped by album-artists and album-name.

If I understand what you want correctly, the simplest solution is I believe to create a custom tag "Original Year" (via Edit\Preferences\Tags (1)\Custom tags). You could then enter the individual songs' years into this tag and use the existing "Year" tag to put the compilation year in. This would result in MusicBee keeping your compilation grouped together when sorting by year, but enables you to still display the original year of individual songs.