Adding data into the release date

[mkeningersoms]

Hello, first post here.

So, I have quite a few albums in my collection that the exact release date isn't on record, or live albums recorded over a series of dates. For these releases, I just like to put month and year in release, for example:

4/1972 for April, 1972
10/1968 for October, 1968

But I have came back on to Musicbee to find that the dates have changed to the following:

4/1/1972 for April 1st, 1972
10/1/1968 for October 1st, 1968

It adds an exact day!

Is there a setting I can use to change this permanently or every time I scan my library will it change back, or should I just pick a day on some releases?

[psychoadept]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

I don't think that's something you can change; it just defaults to 1 so it can format the date according to the settings in Windows. If it's important to you to have it displayed a certain way, you could a custom or virtual tag. Virtual tag functions include one for formatting dates however you want.

[Zak]

There have been a few discussions about this in the last few months.

This is an earlier thread about what MusicBee is doing:

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=32417.0

This is a thread that includes one potential workaround:

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=33194.0


I've only recently decided to start adding full release dates to albums, so I've also been wondering about this same issue and trying to work out the best way to handle it.

If you store only the year, MusicBee will just use that as is.
If you store the year and month, MusicBee will move the month to a Date field and assume 1 as the date (as you've described). This isn't ideal, because it's not an accurate date.
If you store the year, month and date, MusicBee will also move the date to a Date field, but handles it correctly because it's a full date.
So it's only when you know the month but not the date of the release that is an issue.

For now I'm using the date format yyyy-mm-dd, with 00 as a placeholder for unknown months or dates.
e.g.
1972-04-00
1968-10-00
1983-00-00

I still need to test more, but so far it seems that having the dummy '00' value prevents MusicBee from recognising it as a date and trying to do anything with it automatically.
One advantage of this that may not work with other workarounds is that alphabetic sorting also results in a chronological order.

It is likely to break compatibility with other programs that rely on the date tag, but as 90+% of my music listening is done with MusicBee that doesn't bother me as much as it may other people who sync music with their phones etc.

This is the virtual tag I'm using to display formatted dates in various places:

Code

$If($IsMatch(<Year>,"[0-9]{4}-00-00"),$Left(<Year>,4),$If($IsMatch(<Year>,"[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-00"),$Date($Replace(<Year>,-00,-01),MMM yyyy),$Date(<Year>,d MMM yyyy)))

For example, 1972-04-00  will display as Apr 1972.