Negative dates

[likescookies]

For some genres, such as classical, I use the date tag to identify the date of composition rather than the date of recording. I'd prefer to browse Bach by the order he composed his works, for instance.

But what if I had an album of works purportedly composed during, say, the Qin dynasty (221-207 BCE)? Could I use negative dates in my ID3v2.4 tags?

My understanding is that ID3v2.4 supports ISO 8601, which according to Wikipedia, which supports negative years "only by prior agreement between the sender and the receiver."

Thus, I assume negative dates wouldn't work, but was curious as to whether I was being pessimistic?

[simoncn]

In UPnP, the Date tag value must must be in the format YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD and YYYY must be a number greater than 0.

For the purpose that you have described, you can use some other tag and populate it with any value that you wish.

[likescookies]

Thanks. If I created an arbitrary tag that had a sort date and told MinimServer to sort on it, would it sort -221 before, say, 1650?

Just curious.

[simoncn]

Yes, but only because special characters are sorted before numbers. For example, +3 would be sorted before 2. Also, these values would be strings, not dates.

[likescookies]

Ah, OK. So if I had something tagged in that field as from the year "300", I'd need to add a leading zero if I didn't want it to sort after "2020".

And in that field, BCE dates would sort backwards. "-150" would sort before "-227" even though the latter is older.

Oh, well; neither here nor there since it is such an edge case. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[simoncn]

No need for leading zeros. MinimServer supports numeric comparison for any sequence of digits, so 10 comes after 9 as most people would expect.