year vs. releasetime

[simoncn]

(19-03-2013 19:39)winxi Wrote:  Hi,
when converting from flac to mp3 with ffmpeg, there is an ffmpeg option (in fact the default) to preserve tags. However, ffmpeg seems to write the YEAR tag from the flac file to a RELEASETIME tag in the mp3 file (at least these names appear in mp3tag).
With 'Date' in the indexTags property, MinimServer will index the YEAR tag in the flac-file correctly, but not the RELEASETIME tag in the mp3-file.
Is this a non-standard behaviour of ffmpeg? Should I rename the RELEASETIME tag in the mp3-files to YEAR?

Thanks in advance!

The tag you're seeing as RELEASETIME in Mp3tag is the ID3v2 TDRL frame.

The TDRL frame was added in ID3v2.4 with the description 'release time'. Also added in ID3v2.4 were the TDRC frame (described as 'recording time') and the TDOR frame (described as 'original release time'). These frames aren't valid in ID3v2.3.

It is standard practice to map the ID3v2.4 TDRC frame to the FLAC/Vorbis tag DATE (displayed by Mp3tag as YEAR for historical reasons), and MinimServer will support this mapping in the next release. The next release of MinimServer will also support the mapping of TDOR to ORIGINALDATE (displayed by Mp3tag as ORIGYEAR). These mappings will work only if your MP3 files contain ID3v2.4 tags, so it would be a good idea to verify this.

Most tagging programs and servers seem to ignore the TDRL frame, giving preference to TDRC and TDOR, and this is my current intention for MinimServer. I think the best solution is to use Mp3tag to change the TDRL (Mp3tag RELEASETIME) frames to TDRC (Mp3tag YEAR), assuming that your tags are in ID3v2.4 format.

Note: Mp3tag allows the TDRC frame (YEAR) to contain a full date, not just a year.