Is there a way that I can automatically pull the YEAR tag from either Discogs or Musicbrainz (or anywhere really) and just apply the year in a best effort way?
In other words:
For example, I would like to select all files in the list, and somehow get the year from any source (doesn't matter which one) and apply the YEAR field for every file. For any track in the list just make a best effort; if the source has multiple entries for that track just take either the first one or take the first one with a country of US. Something like that. But I want all other tags left untouched which is very important.
I have thousands of tracks with missing YEAR tag and I'd rather just have a best effort attempt to fill them out rather than do it manually.
It looks like other people have wanted something similar but I am not finding a way.
All the web source scripts rely either on an album as smallest organisational unit or on a combination of other data to identify a single track.
In the results dialogue, you can set which tag fields should be added to a file.
You still have to do it either album by album or track by track.
I think that this does not meet your requirements to process any number of files from various albums in one go.
This is not the way the Web Sources Scripts for Mp3tag work.
You always have to manually choose 1 source and 1 script for this specific source.
There is no "search everywhere" functionality.
The reason for this behaviour:
Every script is hand-made specifically for 1 source. The webpage or the API result must be parsed (for example for the content of YEAR). The chance that a script can be used to search on multiple sources is practically zero.
That's fine, I am simply saying that I do not have a preference for the source, I'll take discogs. Then, given the ALBUM and TITLE tags for every file find the YEAR and apply it to file.
But discogs will return multiple entries for almost every ALBUM/TITLE; I don't want to have to sift through all matches, just take the first returned value or add the COUNTRY tag (equals US) to the query. If multiple results come back just take the YEAR tag from the first result and merge for each file.
I have never used any web source scripting for Mp3tag so that would be my first thing to find. Thanks.
You would have to adjust an existing script and add multiple criterias like your US for COUNTRY. But even then you will find several possible albums.
If you look at this example: ARTIST Bon Jovi with ALBUM Forever:
And that is the exact problem. That's why I'm saying "best effort" - I will never get just one result from the search just as you said, so just take the first result.
Yes, I saw his response first. I was simply clarifying to you since you were not following my question. I never desired to search over "every" source. I said in the original post that I did not care which source was used.
And in my opinion, if it were possible, it wouldn't make any sense at all. To fill a year tag in this way, you could use a random generator instead, since each track could come from a variety of albums, many of which have a different year of release.
So a random number generator is equal to a "best effort" ??? Okay....I guess you don't understand the concept. If you have an album and a track - all tracks come from the same album. There might be different years of which an album was released but having a year from a set of years is better than having a "blank".
While it is technically possible (but very much not advisable) to modify a script to just return the first result from a search (which would then have its album info loaded by Mp3Tag automatically), that script would work purely on the odds of having the first hit of a search results' list be the exact match to what you would be searching for.
Other than modded scripts tailored for that specific personal use case, I don't believe there would be much interest from an author in developing a web source script which would -by design- have such a inconsistent success ratio of correct results.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an empty tag field, it is simply not there if it does not contain a value. But that is beside the point.
I always operate on the principle that if I cannot get accurate information or am not willing to go to the trouble of researching it, I would rather not store information that is not unlikely to be incorrect. I will not accept incorrect information just to make it look better.
If you have possibly incorrect data in your tags and later decide that you should only have correct data, this would make it a lot of trouble to correct them later. You would simply have to check all the fields again and not just add information that is not yet there.
I think we disagree on more than just that. When using whatever app, Mp3tag, Apple Music, etc. The "year" field is empty from the point of the app - no year is shown. I'm sorry that was not clear to you. It is not a matter of "just to make it look better" it is a matter to give me an approximation when particular music came out. Was it this decade, last decade? In a world of truly massive data I think your approach is limited. "Outliers" are a fact of life. I have terabytes of music. I could research these missing fields for a long time.
If you have possibly incorrect data in your tags and later decide that you should only have correct data, this would make it a lot of trouble to correct them later. You would simply have to check all the fields again and not just add information that is not yet there.
Clearly I am okay with living this right? Or do you think that you just "informed" me of this. I clearly find the year to be far less important than the artist, album tags.
This only applies to artists who only release an album once.
If you are looking for an album by an artist without the YEAR, it is only possible to find the right one if there is only 1 album worldwide that has been released once.
Many artists publish their works several times. Just look at this example from ABBA for the ALBUM Waterloo from the source MusicBrainz:
The first album was released as 12"-Vinyl LP in France at 1974-03-04 with only 11 tracks.
The same day a release with 12 tracks was released in Sweden.
4 months later there was a release in US also with 12 tracks.
...
14 years later there was a new release on CD with 12 tracks in Sweden.
You can see in the above picture how many different release exists for the "same" Waterloo album.
If you don't care about the number of tracks and the country or the media, you maybe get 1974 as YEAR.
If you insist that the release country has to be Germany or Japan, then you get 1990 or 1992 as YEAR.
If you have a 14-track version, then you get 2001 as YEAR.
If you got your copy as Digital Media, you get 2009 as YEAR.
If you own the 13-track version, then you get 2014 as YEAR.
In which decade you would assume the "first hit search result"?
1974? 1988, 1990, 1992..., 2001, 2011, 2014...?
This just shows how difficult it can be to match YOUR local copy with the existing one - in this case from the source MusicBrainz.
If you do the same at Discogs, it becomes even more complicated with 219 listed possible matches.
You could argue that you search for the 11 track Polydor CD from US with catalog number 42284 3643-2. Sure, you get the YEAR 1995 as result.
But is 1995 the decade your are looking for "when particular music came out"?
