How can I tag music with the song's original year, not when it was published?

Question

One problem I encounter with automatically tagged music is that the "Date" field is when the recording was published, not when the song was first released.

So, for example, my copy of "The End of the World" by Skeeter Davis is tagged as having a date of 2013, which I guess is when it was published to Amazon or whatever. I would much rather have the song with a date of 1962 when the song was first recorded and released. Either that, or I would like a new field "Release" with the same information. This would allow me to filter songs on the release date, so I can get all the songs from the 1950s or 1960s or whatever.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

This is in part an artifact of the database used by the foobar2000 music player which is freedb which is inherently CD based and therefor dates reflect relates of the CD the music was on. It has a similar limitation for classical music since composers, conductors, etc aren't reflected in the metadata.

You have two main choices. You can switch over to using something like MusicBrainz Picard that includes things like original release metadata or use MusicBrainz freedb gateway. As it says in it's "limitations" ironically: "The year is always set to the first one on the matching database entry."

Here's an example: https://musicbrainz.org/recording/24f6297b-8afa-44a9-8ab7-e18c496ae752 Note that the earliest and official track is shown first. When using the freedb gateway this is what will be returned.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/FreeDB_Gateway

To use it in foobar2000 you must add it to foobar2000's freedb servers in preferences, tools, tagging, freedb tagger:

Host: freedb.musicbrainz.org
Port: 80
Address: /~cddb/cddb.cgi

Answer 2

I too have had this problem. This is how I usually solve it:

1. Check https://musicbrainz.org, they have the old original dates.

Install the musicbrainz component:

https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_musicbrainz

Now select all the files in 1 album (make sure they are in the correct cd order starting from 1) > right click > Tagging > Get tags from MusicBrainz

Select which every option suits you (there are 3).

a. First try with TOC (Table of contents):

If that doesn't work, try

b. artist and album:

If even that doesn't work

c. Album ID:

Go to music brainz and find the exact release that you want, then from the url you can get the album ID.

https://musicbrainz.org/release/18650177-22ab-470b-90d8-37fc54aae4ba

Use that:

18650177-22ab-470b-90d8-37fc54aae4ba

2. If musicbrainz does not have the original dates, find them from wikipedia.

Select all the files in that album > Alt + Enter

Add the correct date.