Adding additional tags to files using beets

[Andy Pastuszak]

I have been using MusicBrainz Picard to tag all my music and have been playing with beets and loving it.

One of things I noticed is that beets does not use the Musicbrainz tag "Original Year," which is something I use quite a lot.  Is there a way to get beets to write this tag to the metadata of my files?

Andy

[Adrian Sampson]

Hi! I’m glad you’re enjoying beets. It does actually fetch the original year:

$ beet fields | grep original
original_day
original_month
original_year

You can see it by typing something like:

$ beet list -af '$original_year $album'

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "beets" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beets-users...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Andy Pastuszak]

Perhaps I am doing something wrong.  I have a folder full of songs for the album California 37 by Train.  I did a beets import and it imported them and found the correct release.  Just to make sure tags were written, I used the beet write command.  When I load the files back up in Picard, they don't have the Original Year or Musicbrainz Tracck ID tags.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that I have FLAC files with Vorbis comments?

[Adrian Sampson]

That should be fine. Can you look at the metadata with the `beet info` command (for which you’ll need to enable the `info` plugin) and compare that to what Picard sees? If there’s a mismatch, there may be a compatibility plugin in either Picard or beets.

[Andy Pastuszak]

Sure.  I'll play with it tonight.  Thanks for getting back to me.

[Andy Pastuszak]

Ok when I do beet info, it shows the two missing tags:  original_year and mb_trackid.  But when I look at the tracks in Musicbrainz Picard I don't see either track.  In Foobar2000, I see the MUSICBRAINZ_TRACKID tag, but I don't see original year.

When I use metaflac with the --list option, it does not show an original year tag of any kind.  I can use both commands and paste the output in, if you're interested.

Andy

[Adrian Sampson]

Yes, please include all the output.

[Andy Pastuszak]

Did you delete the post with the attachments?

[Adrian Sampson]

Hmm, no—were there attachments? Perhaps Google Groups filtered them?

[Andy Pastuszak]

I'll email them to you direct.

Andy

[Adrian Sampson]

Thanks for sending the output; it’s weird that Google Groups wouldn’t let you send those files!

I found this line in the metaflac output:

    comment[49]: ORIGINALDATE=2012-04-13

So it looks like the data’s in the right place. I’m not sure why Picard or Foobar wouldn’t display the tag.

[Andy Pastuszak]

The tag I am looking for is Original Year, not original date.

[Adrian Sampson]

It might be helpful to know that there’s a difference—in beets and most other tools—between the abstract field name that you see as a user and the on-disk name used in tags. For example, FLAC files use a field whose “physical name” is `DISCC`, but that’s not too helpful for humans—so beets and other tools use a “logical name” like `disctotal`.

It’s the same way for `ORIGINALDATE`. Most tools will show you a more legible name, like “Original Year,” or `original_year` in beets’ case, that even splits the part of the date apart. But that doesn’t mean metaflac will show you that name!

It might be worth doing a little bit of research into Picard and Foobar to see how they interpret this data. I did a little bit of looking, and Picard’s docs show that they use both `ORIGINALDATE` and `ORIGINALYEAR`:
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/mappings/#cite_note-0

I’m not sure what it means that both are present in the list. In any case, if you can nail down exactly what those other tools are looking for in their “physical” tag storage format, please do file a bug—we can make sure we’re compatible.

Adrian

[Andy Pastuszak]

Picard writes both the Original Date and Original Year Tag.  I'll tag the file with Picard and then file a bug for the appropriate vorbis comment.  Perhaps if there was a plugin that let you define tags you wanted added from Musicbrainz, the burden can be placed on the user instead of the developer.

Andy