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Topic: Help Making My Release Date (Read 2203 times) previous topic - next topic
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Help Making My Release Date

I would please appreciate advice with "release dates".   Specifically, I have a media server I use for FLAC files called "Audio Request" wherein my metadata is tagged with the usual album, artist, genre and year. 

The system also uses "release date".  I have been entering this release date manually in the "Audio Request" system itself in this format: "January 1, 2020". 

Entering the information manually within Audio Request works, but I have thousands of albums to add to the system that have the release date metadata already embedded and it would be much effective to load the albums into the Audio Request and have all the metadata simply show up.

I would like to prepare the "release date" metadata information in my metadata tagging program so that I don't have to enter it manually within "Audio Request" for every album - but I am having trouble with this and would appreciate advice. Here are the details:

When one opens "Audio Request" the release dates for albums are always shown in this format: January 1, 2020.

From looking at metadata of tagged media that was in Audio Request, it appears that this "Release Date" is using a metadata field  it calls "release_time".  I created a custom field in mp3tag for "release_time".  For the purpose of testing I created a small 5 second FLAC file and gave it the release date of "January 1, 2020".  That file tagged by mp3tag is attached to this post.

When I load this prepared file into the Audio Request my release date does show up in the correct window in Audio Request, but it is not showing up in the desired format.  Instead, the release date shows up in Audio Request as numbers and time: 2020-01-01 00:00:00

I deleted this release date field within the "Audio Request" and manually reentered and saved the release date "January 1, 2020". This information holds correctly in the proper format as "January 1, 2020" once it is saved by Audio Request.

I have attached here the file after it has been re-saved by "Audio Request".  I believe there might be some slightly different metadata written into it after Audio Request is re-saving files that I might be missing.

Summary: There appears to be something different in how Audio Request is saving the "release date" metadata but I am not technically adept enough to understand what that difference is or what I need to do to accomplish this in my metadata tagging program. 

I do hope the uploaded files provide a clue. Any recommendations on how I might solve this are most appreciated.
Hoping you are all safe and well.

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #1
A difference that I see is that the Mp3tag case contains "Jan" and the file from the system contains "January". Try changing the month and day to see if it reads those at all, or sets them to 1 and uses the Date field. Maybe try adding the other fields one at a time, for example METADATA_SOURCE = user. Maybe it will read the date only if those are set.

It is defintitely possible to use Mp3tag Actions to reformat the date field from ISO format to Month Day, Year.

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #2
Thanks for the advice.
I tried different dates and Audio Request is showing them fine, albeit in ISO format.

You suggested an example trying "METADATA_SOURCE = user" and I'd like to try that, but I'm not sure what it means.  Can you please clarify?


 

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #4
I've attached here another example of the release date as written into the metadata by Audio Request.
This file is dated March 15, 2020.  I see the information the same in Mp3tag and exiftool "March 15, 2020" in the field "release_time". 

I can't seem to duplicate the results by writing in the information myself in mp3tag first and then loading it into Audio Request.  When I write a date in Mp3tag and load it into Audio Request I get an ISO date in Audio Request.

I found I could successfully use Mp3tag to modify the date if it was already written into the file by Audio Request.  For example, I took the March 15, 2020 date above and changed it to March 23, 2020 using Mp3tag and it showed up correctly as March 23, 2020 in Audio Request.  (This was for a test only as I would not need to modify a date using Mp3tag if it was already dated by Audio Request,)

Any suggestions on how I might get a date format showing up as MM, DD, YYYY instead of the ISO date format are most appreciated.

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #5
So far it seems that Audio Request doesn't adhere to any common mappings and has its own. What I would try is add the other fields that exist in an AR file, apart from the date. Maybe you need one of them present.

You can see them under right-click > Extended Tags in Mp3tag.

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #6
Thank you for the interest and good advice.

I tried copying the other fields from a file that did have the date shown correctly into a different FLAC file to see if it would work.  The metadata information copied over in Mp3tag fine, but unfortunately it didn't make the date show up any differently in Audio Request.

In looking at these files further I saw that there is also another difference in the files from Audio Request when I open them using "exiftool".   The Audio Request files have an "ID3 Size: 128".  This is not a field that I see in Mp3tag so I was not able to copy it over.

I may be wrong about this, but I believe "ID3 Size: 128" indicates metadata from ID3V1.0, which was typically written into mp3 files many years ago.  I may be misinterpreting this, but could it be that Audio Request is also writing ID3 information into the FLAC files?  That "ID3 Size: 128" information only appears in the files after they are handled by Audio Request and I don't think Mp3tag reads it.

Is there a way to copy "ID3 Size: 128" information from one file to another to test this out?  I am not familiar with how that might be done.

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #7
The files do indeed have an ID3 tag appended. This extra data should not be there and is ignored by most applications. I doubt any program depends on it for its functionality. You can remove an ID3 tag with mp3tag from the context menu. As it is non-standard, it can't normally be added to FLAC format files. The easiest way to trick an application to add or remove ID3 is to temporarily rename your files with an .mp3 extension.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with Audio Request and can't say anything definite about it.

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #8
Apparently it's this piece of crap. An integrated audio server appliance, with software that sees fit to munge with your files.

Re: Help Making My Release Date

Reply #9
Yeah, non-standard implementations really shouldn't be done, particularly when there are established protocols.

That suggested trick of changing the file suffix to .mp3 and back to .flac successfully removed the ID3 tag.
I then tried re-loading the media without the ID3 tag and the date is still showing up in the desired format -- so at least the unusual ID3 tag has nothing to do with this date format showing up correctly or not.

I also tried removing the other unusual fields that Audio Request was writing to the FLAC file and then reloaded it into the system. This didn't change the date format.  So, the problem does not appear to be related to other metadata fields either.

Is it possible that Audio Request is simply writing an invisible character at the end of the "release_time" field it is using for this date, such as "end of transmission block" "U+0017"?  I am not sure how to read or determine this, but possibly someone more savvy knows how to read and write that type of data on the FLAC sample I uploaded.

I'll keep at it.  Thanks for the suggestions.