How to Make Smartlists Respect Dates for Compilation Albums w Different Years

General Discussions
1

My library is a mix of FLAC and Apple-based AAC. I have tagged (most) all my songs using MusicBrainz and set the date field of each track to be populated as the 4 digit year from the %_recording_firstreleasedate% field of the database.

That’s good, not perfect, so i have also gone in and manually edited some dates using JRiver Media Center 33.

My music library is set to prefer local metadata.

After making sure MusicBrainz has saved the tag changes to the files, that the tags have flowed to JRiver, and any manual adjustments in JRiver are saved back to the file tags, when I subsequently rescan my music library and then also refresh the music metadata, what i am seeing is that smartlists will always identify a track based on the date of the first track in its parent album – even when the track itself has a different year in its underlying data tag.

As far as trouble shooting, MusicBrainz can see the changes made in the tags by JRiver. And it doesn’t appear to matter if the files also have a value in the Date (Release) field.

Any ideas?

2

Currently, there is no way. Dates, cover art, and a few other metadata are only applied per release (i.e. album), not per song.

3

That’s disappointing. Is there any way of knowing if a change there is even under consideration?

Plex’s ability to sort a list based on song popularity, plus automatically pulling in mood and genre tags would allow for very strong radio-station style smart lists that would be era specific if it could work off track dates rather than album dates. Perfect for shuffle play.

Using one date makes compilation albums a real liability to that use case rather than a help.