DSF files date tag not always indexing.

[paulg]

I have recently started using DSD rips of SACD’s with Minimserver and with your help have resolved most of my tagging issues but one strange one remains.

On some of the files the ‘Date’ tag doesn’t seem to index. They get marked as ‘[unknown].

The tag options that I have set are below:

Album.sortTags={+Artist, +Date}, Date.yearOnly.index

Where I have 2 albums released the same year by an artist I will date tag them as per the example below;

2021-01-01, 2022-01-02 etc.

As I say it works on some DSD files but not others. All my FLAC files index correctly though.

[simoncn]

DSF files use ID3v2 tags. Date tagging changed between ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 and some tagging programs don't handle this correctly.

Please try doing a full rescan. Does this produce any warning messages in the MinimServer log about Date tags in the files with this problem?

To do a full rescan, set the startupScan property to 'full' before you do the rescan.

[paulg]

(22-11-2023 00:11)simoncn Wrote:  DSF files use ID3v2 tags. Date tagging changed between ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 and some tagging programs don't handle this correctly.

Please try doing a full rescan. Does this produce any warning messages in the MinimServer log about Date tags in the files with this problem?

To do a full rescan, set the startupScan property to 'full' before you do the rescan.

I have had a play around with a test profile and it seems that the DATE tag only accepts a year entry (eg;2023).

In order to display a year against every DSF album and to still be able to order the albums by an artist in order of release I amended all the DATE tags to display just the year and then added a new wild tag called 'Channels2' and used this tag to add a consecutive count and then set the sort order of this new tag with a +.

Example.

Two albums by one artists released in 2022

With FLAC I would tag the DATE tag as 2022-01-01 and 2022-01-02 and set the sort order for the DATE tag with a + to display the 2022-01-01 first on my list of albums by this artist.

With DSF I have had to tag the DATE tag as 2022 for both albums and then add the sub tag to allow ordering into my new 'Channels2' tag so 01 on the first album and 02 on the second album.

Here is my new setup.

indexTags:

Artist, All Artists, Channels1:Compilations, Albumsort:Collections, Genre:Genres, Date:Year Of Release, Channels:Stereo / Multichannel, Grouping:Media Format / Audiophile Labels, *RecentAdded, *RecentPlayed, #AudioData, #AudioFormat, Channels2:.

tagOptions:

Album.sortTags={+Artist, +Date, +Channels2}, Date.yearOnly.index

tagValue:

Grouping.default={'Various Other'}, Channels1.default={'Non Compilations'}, Albumsort.default={'Non Collections'}, Channels.default={'Stereo'}, Channels2.default={'.'}

I used a . and moved it to the bottom of the list because I don't need to browse the tag, it is just to enable ordering of albums by the artist.

[simoncn]

A few points in no particular order:

You can tag dates in DSF files as YYYY-MM-DD but the way this is done is different between ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. A good tagging program should hide these differences but not all tagging programs do this successfully. I am not sure which tagging program you are using or whether you are using ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 for the tags in your DSF files.

It isn't a good idea to overload a tag (such as DATE) with unrelated information (such as the number of channels). Using separate tags is a much better approach and works very well with MinimServer.

You shouldn't need to create your own tag for the number of channels because MinimServer has a built-in special tag #AudioChannels that contains this information. This tag is created by reading the audio data in the file.

[paulg]

(22-11-2023 21:44)simoncn Wrote:  A few points in no particular order:

You can tag dates in DSF files as YYYY-MM-DD but the way this is done is different between ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. A good tagging program should hide these differences but not all tagging programs do this successfully. I am not sure which tagging program you are using or whether you are using ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 for the tags in your DSF files.

It isn't a good idea to overload a tag (such as DATE) with unrelated information (such as the number of channels). Using separate tags is a much better approach and works very well with MinimServer.

You shouldn't need to create your own tag for the number of channels because MinimServer has a built-in special tag #AudioChannels that contains this information. This tag is created by reading the audio data in the file.

Simon,
Thanks for your tips. I’ll play around further using these tips. I use Mp3tag.

[simoncn]

Mp3tag gets confused between Date and Year. The tag shows as Date but actually contains a Year value. I'll look into this some more tomorrow and post back here.

[simoncn]

In ID3v2.3, there is a TYER field containing the year (YYYY) and there is a TDAT field containing the day and month (DDMM). Mp3tag shows the TYER field as Year and the TDAT field as date.

In ID3v2.4, TYER and TDAT have been replaced with a TDRC field containing the full date (YYYY-MM-DD). Mp3tag shows the TDRC field as Year even though it contains day and month information as well as year information.