2019-05-01, 11:48
I'm sure this has been asked before but I have searched and Googled extensively and not found anything. So here goes.
A well-known problem is that Musicbrainz has a lot of info, but rarely gives you what you want. Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" was released in 1967, which is the date I want displayed in Kodi. However, Musicbriainz contains over 50 releases of that same album, which are re-releases on Vinyl, cassette, CD, "Remastered" CDs, "special edition" CD cases and what not. The problem is that the release date for each of these releases is the one for that particular version. Most (but not all!) of these MB entries contain an "originaldate" and/or "Original Date" tag, but Kodi doesn't use that; it simply displays the release that for that particular album. As other posters have already pointed out as early as 2013, no CDs were available before 1980, which means that according to Kodi, Pink Floyd's "Piper" was released in 1989, which is utter nonsense.
Yes, I do understand the need for MB to differentiate between, say, the Canadian release of Piper (which contained 11 tracks) and the American one (which contained 9 tracks in a different order and not all the same as on the original album, for reasons best known to the music industry at the time) and I also understand that when you let Picard do its own lookup you will end up with your original "Dark side of the Moon" CD being labeled as a Polish bootleg on cassette). But that's related to the fact that MB is a great idea from a technical standpoint but can be a disaster in terms of user experience, which is another matter entirely. What I'm battling with is the release date which, as displayed in Kodi, simply is the wrong one.
The solution is simple and obvious: use the original release date (if there is one) rather than the release date for whatever re-release MB has used. But Kodi doesn't seem able to do this. I've searched far and wide but this option doesn't seem to exist.
Yes, of course I could override all this manually using Picard or another tagger (and then I'd have to make sure that Kodi NEVER, EVER goes online to "update" my corrected details with the wrong ones again) or simply do everything by hand. But my library currently contains over 135,000 tracks and I might die of old age (or, more likely, Kodi and MP3 will become obsolete and be replaced with something else entirely) before I'm done.
So. How in the name of all that's unholy do I get Kodi to use the original release date rather than the date for whatever re-release CD I have?
A well-known problem is that Musicbrainz has a lot of info, but rarely gives you what you want. Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" was released in 1967, which is the date I want displayed in Kodi. However, Musicbriainz contains over 50 releases of that same album, which are re-releases on Vinyl, cassette, CD, "Remastered" CDs, "special edition" CD cases and what not. The problem is that the release date for each of these releases is the one for that particular version. Most (but not all!) of these MB entries contain an "originaldate" and/or "Original Date" tag, but Kodi doesn't use that; it simply displays the release that for that particular album. As other posters have already pointed out as early as 2013, no CDs were available before 1980, which means that according to Kodi, Pink Floyd's "Piper" was released in 1989, which is utter nonsense.
Yes, I do understand the need for MB to differentiate between, say, the Canadian release of Piper (which contained 11 tracks) and the American one (which contained 9 tracks in a different order and not all the same as on the original album, for reasons best known to the music industry at the time) and I also understand that when you let Picard do its own lookup you will end up with your original "Dark side of the Moon" CD being labeled as a Polish bootleg on cassette). But that's related to the fact that MB is a great idea from a technical standpoint but can be a disaster in terms of user experience, which is another matter entirely. What I'm battling with is the release date which, as displayed in Kodi, simply is the wrong one.
The solution is simple and obvious: use the original release date (if there is one) rather than the release date for whatever re-release MB has used. But Kodi doesn't seem able to do this. I've searched far and wide but this option doesn't seem to exist.
Yes, of course I could override all this manually using Picard or another tagger (and then I'd have to make sure that Kodi NEVER, EVER goes online to "update" my corrected details with the wrong ones again) or simply do everything by hand. But my library currently contains over 135,000 tracks and I might die of old age (or, more likely, Kodi and MP3 will become obsolete and be replaced with something else entirely) before I'm done.
So. How in the name of all that's unholy do I get Kodi to use the original release date rather than the date for whatever re-release CD I have?