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When adding songs to Plex Music library, Plex using the “Original Release Year” ID3 tag from Track 1 vs the “Release Year” for the full album. This causes Best Of/Compliation albums to reflect incorrect dates.
IE: Track 1 originally released 1972-01-01, Best Of release 2004-01-01. Plex shows 1972 as the Album date.
As far as I can see, Plex does not read the Original Release Date tag (TDOR) at all, it pulls that data from MusicBrainz only. It does read the Release Date (TDRL).
Also, Plex stores release date/year only on the album level, not on the individual track level. If you have an album with individual songs from 2001, 2002 and 2003, all tracks will have 2003 in Plex.
It’s been a long standing request to change this for over ten years, but so far no luck.
The date on MusicBrainz is accurate for the release of the album, so Plex has nothing to pull as far as I can tell.
Hmm…so what’s exactly the dates in MBZ, and what are the date fields you have in the tags?
Using Simon & Garfunkel as an example, just because they’re old. Track 1, Wednesday Morning 3AM, was released in 1964. The compilation album, “The Essential Simon & Garfunkel”, was released in 2003.
Instead of Plex saying “ok this greatest hits album was release in 2003” it looks at Track 1 and says “this song was released in 1964” and that’s the date it uses for sorting in the “originally available” field for the entire album.
edit: the track date on Musicbrainz is 1964, thats where i pulled the metadata from for my tags.
If you change that date in the embedded tags to 1963 and do a rescan, does the Originally Available date change to 1963 or does it stay with 1964 that Plex pulls in from MBZ?
It’s quite tricky these days to figure out exactly what fields Plex reads from embedded tags, and what fields are only pulled from the online Musicbrainz database. Genres for example are pulled from tags, but Style and Mood tags are ignored, and are only pulled in from Musicbrainz. And until recently, Release Type was only pulled in from Musicbrainz, but now it will also read it from embedded tags.
that’s an interesting hypothesis that I hadn’t tried. I just went in as you suggested and changed the date from 1964 to 1970, did a refresh metadata and the album date did indeed change to 1970.
So it’s definitely looking at “Original Release Year” for Track 1 for the album date.
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