[AnalogKid]

Call me a stickler (or worse), but I do like to have my albums displayed in chronological order.

XBMC does a fine job of this, until you have more than one album in the same year.

Since some artists had the audacity to release more than one album per year, I would like to propose the ability to support the 'YEAR' field with a proper date and not just the year. This would then allow albums to be presented in their true chronological order and not some Year/Alphabetical mix.

[jmarshall]

I believe we already have it as a date in at least the infotag class, though I believe it's only referenced to year in the db. I'm not sure which tagging schemes support this fully however.

I agree this would be a welcome addition, though ofcourse it would need to work well with year-only dates.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[AnalogKid]

I believe we already have it as a date in at least the infotag class, though I believe it's only referenced to year in the db. I'm not sure which tagging schemes support this fully however.

I agree this would be a welcome addition, though ofcourse it would need to work well with year-only dates.

Cheers,
Jonathan

It seems at a cursory glance that the tag editors I use merely insert the date as a string, with some of them not bothering to validate the text at all.
I've tagged a few files as 1980.1 and 1980.2 (yes I know, "what kinda date is THAT?"). XBMC manages to resolve them both to 1980 which is good, but loses the extra digit it seems).

I would assume that if a tag only had the year, XBMC could either store the year only, or assume 1/Jan/(year) in the database. Whether the fully qualified date should be returned to the skins is another matter entirely. As long as the sorting code can utilise the fully qualified date... hey presto! (see how I did that... made it sound like a trivial matter? years of management gave me that skill!)

ID3V1 and 2 really pin the 'year' frame (TYE) down to 4 chars, so not an option for standards compliance....however... ID3V2 has a Date (TDA) and Time (TIM) frame too!... or even a full timestamp (TDRL) frame in ID3V2.4

There's also a couple of specialist sort ordering frames too, but I doubt most editors ever use these.