Date format for songs

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#: 1.16.3.1402

Hi,

I was looking at some songs albums from plex and noticed that some don’t have the release year/date. Although all my songs have a date they are released tagged.
Currently it is set to this format: YMD, where year is four digits.
I can change it to: DMY, MDY, YDM, and change four digit to two digit.

What would be the correct way so plex can pick it up properly.

Also all my albums are downloaded with a cover file named folder.jpg which is stored in the same folder as the songs, still I find numerous albums that don’t have a cover. Should it be named differently?

2

Plex currently doesn’t read the release date from mp3 files.
It can read from flac files though.
The correct date format is yyyy-mm-dd

3

That’s really unfortunate. I don’t see my self downloading flac files, 4x as large and I will never use such high quality. Will do it without than for now. And make sure I have the date settings correct for when it does get supported.
Thanks for your reply

4

Yeah it’s a bit weird how Plex handles this, it has a Year field that’s filled with the TYER tag, but also a Release Date field that isn’t used at all, even though you’d expect it to use the combination of TYER (which is a YYYY format) and TDAT (MMDD) with id3v2.3 and lower or the TDRC or TDRA fields in id3v2.4.

It feels a bit like a remnant of the past where Plex was set up as a video focused database, ie a Year field for movies and a Release Date field for TV episodes.

5

Where did Plex get this info from, if not a Release date? This is an album I added a few days ago, in MP3 format, tagged with MusicBrainz Picard. I haven’t edited anything manually with Plex.

LOL – don’t even pretend to understand the TYER, TDAT, TDRC or TDRA fields, and the proper way to use them, but it looks to me that Plex is grabbing a release date from someplace. MP3Tag shows me this info:

YEAR: 1988-02-23
ORIGYEAR: 1988-02-23   
ORIGINALYEAR: 1988

Picard has similar fields:

Date: 1988-02-23
Original Release Date: 1988-02-23
Original Year: 1988

Now_and_Zen
Now_and_Zen731×528 33.1 KB

6

You certainly meant:
Where did Plex get this from, if not from embedded meta tags?

Answer: Gracenote or last.fm perhaps.
The issue with these two is that you never know which release you got, so the date could be either from the original release or from one of the (sometimes numerous) releases after that.
Hence the desire to get Plex to read the release date from the embedded meta tags instead.

7

Your exactly right, I meant from the embedded meta tags.

I’m using a “Premium” music library. I don’t really know which agents are currently used in that type of library, if any. My understanding it was Gracenote, now disabled, but maybe now it’s last.fm.

I do have the option to “Use embedded tags, if present” enabled, so I assumed it would use those first, then look for additional tags from wherever. I did check several albums, and all have the Originally Available info that matches perfectly with the embedded tags. Guess I’m just lucky it’s always worked correctly for me. :grin:

Edit: I also have “local media assets” enabled and at the top of the priority list for all of my media, from music to movies. Just have to make sure I don’t have bad tags before I add them to Plex

Edit #2 : just checked several albums that I wasn’t so particular with for a “Release Date” that uses the YYY-MMM-DD format and Plex always shows the Originally available as YYYY (the correct one) but always a generic MM and DD of 01-01

8

So I conducted a little experiment to find out if Plex was using my tags in an MP3. I added the album “Bed of Rose’s” by the Statler Brothers, and did not include a specific release date (YYY-MM-DD), just the year. Plex scanned the file properly, but showed the Originally Available Date as 1970-01-01

BedRoses_01
BedRoses_01734×534 35.9 KB

I then changed / added the embedded metatags so that the date was formatted, in the tags I mentioned previously, to be "“1970-10-10” , Plex danced the album so the new metadata could be found, and now Originally Available shows 1970-10-10

BedRoses_02
BedRoses_02734×535 35.2 KB

the Last.FM website says the release date is 1970-10-13, and I deliberately used a different date of 3 days earlier in the embedded tags. Certainly not conclusive, but Plex seems to be respecting the embedded tags, and not using info from Last.FM. My understanding is that Gracenote is disabled, and the only other agent available is Discogs, which I believe only has a simple YYYY release date. Just for fun, I also checked MusicBrainz, and they do not not have a specific release date for that album, only the year.

Probably all irrelevant with the changes coming to music libraries (hopefully soon) but I’m convinced Plex is actually using the embedded tags. :smiley:

.

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