[bugwelle]

Year is usually (and used by mp3taggers) the year of the original release of the album. Release date is the date that particular pressing/reissue of the album was released on. The original programmer may have reversed those two and is using the release date as the original release and Year as the year of that particular reissue. So for example pink floyds the wall had an original release date of 1979 with reissues in 82, 85 etc.
as the program has no way of knowing what release you have it leaves it blank for you to put in for yourself.
As there has been a lot of discussion about the music side of mediaelch , which he has admitted is lacking and will not be worked on for a while may I suggest the program Musicbrainz Picard for your music collections. It has a little bit of a steep learning curve but is very good at filling in your tags. As far as I know kodi does not actually use nfo files for music but will use the tags in the files themselves for the scrapping information. I could be wrong on that but I don't have any nfo files in my music folders and it can scrape just fine using the tags that I have put in using Musicbrainz.
Me

Wow, thank you very much! I have added MusicBrainz Picard to the list of alternatives here: https://mediaelch.github.io/mediaelch-do...elch-exist
There is no shame in admitting that there are better alternatives.

I have also added a note to MediaElch's source code mentioning the difference between year and release date.