Help Finding Track Year

[phred]

I've got about a thousand tracks that are missing the Year tag.  My personal preference for this tag is the year the track was recorded, not the year released, but for these tracks, I'll take anything.  The tracks have proper Artist and Title tags, but not proper Album tags.  I have tried using
Tools > Tagging Tools > Auto-Tag by Track > Identify Track and Update Tags
with "Year" in the Update Fields drop-down and "update blank fields only" checked.
The results are always "failed" with various reasons, such as "no match for artist" or "unable to match name of track."  Most of these are not obscure tracks or artists.  But when I get a result that says "no match for artist Bob Dylan on musicbrainz.org" I really have to start wondering what's wrong here. 

In Tags (2) I have enabled, in this order, Discogs, MusicBrainz, freeDB, Gracenote, and last.fm.

I find it hard to believe none of these sites can match Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and come up with the year.  What is MB sending?  Is it because I don't have valid Album tagging for these tracks that I'm coming up matchless?

Help and guidance greatly appreciated. 

[redwing]

Track auto-tagger would be the least reliable tool for the task. I'm using it only as a last resort for a reference when any other info is unavailable for the track. Album auto-tagger is a little better than that as it offers more data, but still the same in the sense that you must take it only as a reference since the track's original album is frequently missing from the list. I think we had this discussion before, and I only trust the information I obtained by my own research.

[phred]

Track auto-tagger would be the least reliable tool for the task. I'm using it only as a last resort for a reference when any other info is unavailable for the track. Album auto-tagger is a little better than that as it offers more data, but still the same in the sense that you must take it only as a reference since the track's original album is frequently missing from the list.

I just tried the Album auto-tagger for a few tracks and for my use, it's no better than the Track auto-tagger.  But thanks for reminding me it exists.

I think we had this discussion before, and I only trust the information I obtained by my own research.

That wouldn't surprise me.  I revisit my missing year tags every few months in hopes of getting them tagged.  I just don't have the energy/ambition to check Billboard, Wikipedia, et al manually for the 1000 tracks.  At least not at this point in time.

[redwing]

You can be helped by playing track panel opened at the bottom of the main panel.
Open its configuration pane, and add "wiki" item that searches with "title" instead of "artist".



Then you will automatically get the wikipedia page of playing track. Songfacts is also useful, but doesn't have much data.

[phred]

That's a -great- idea, redwing!!
This is what's so great about the MusicBee Forums.  MB is so configurable that ten people might be doing the same task using eleven different methods!! 

Thanks.

[redwing]

I did some more research on this and found a more powerful way.

Add this to Playing Track panel configuration pane:

Google :  https://www.google.com/search?q=$First(<Artist>)+$Split(<Title>,"(",1)

It will show playing track's original album and release date:




I don't know how Google does this, but my guess is they retrieve the song data from their own database.

Most standard songs work. If it doesn't work for a song, you will get the most relevant links below it for further research.

[phred]

NICE!!
Got eight out of ten good hits.  I need 17 more to get the 'no year' playlist down to under a thousand.

Thanks a lot redwing!

[phred]

@redwing-
I just want to say thanks again for coming up with this marvelous solution to finding the year of release.  When you replied about three weeks ago, I had about 1000 tracks with missing year.  I'm now down to 254, with the hope being that in the next couple of days I'll be down to less than a dozen, with these being what appear to be fairly obscure tracks that don't show up on the internet.  Or if they do, they don't reference a year.

So thanks, redwing, both from me, and my wife who says this project has keep me out of her way for the past three weeks.

[redwing]

No problem. Glad it helped!

[WaverlyNova]

@redwing-
Thanks for this awesome tip/trick I'm now able to sort my music by original year released with original album name. I'm using this and two other custom web links found on this forum so I am now able to manually fix my music tags quicker with virtual and custom tags. Thanks again. 😁