Improved performance when reading MP4 files
Mp3tag now reads MP4 files faster than before which should be significant on large collections (many files) or collections including MP4 video (large files).
Improved compatibility of YEAR in ID3v2.3
With Mp3tag v2.53 released almost one year ago we decided to combine the release year (ID3v2.3 frame TYER, displayed as YEAR) and release date (ID3v2.3 frame TDAT, displayed as DATE) in YEAR and display it as YYYY-MM-DD. The intention was to improve compatibility with other applications and the ID3v2 standard.
Since then we've received numerous support requests both here on the Mp3tag Forums and via email from users who are unsatisfied with that change. Either because they use a different formatting of date values, use some value denoting a specific time frame (e.g., the 80s) or simply wanted to preserve values that were not fitting in the new date formatting scheme.
With Mp3tag v2.58 we revert this change to the previous behavior.
Other improvements
Furthermore, this version fixes various issues that have been reported after the last release of Mp3tag. For a full list of changes please see the History of Changes.
Would have appreciated it if you made an option for the behavior of YEAR in ID3v2.3. In version 2.57 it was following the standard and now you break this standard again.
In my opinion it would have been better if this was optional since other programs rely on standard behavior and some on nonstandard behavior. And since this application is made for handling mp3 tags it should either provide this flexibility or at least be able to do it as the standard says.
Hope this get’s fixed in one of the next versions. Till then I’m going to stick with version 2.57
I also would like information on how to accomplish this. My 'Publish' dates recorded as YYYYMMDD are wiped out when I save (any) tags in MPETag.
Sadly, I need to use MP3Tag to 'fix' every audiobook I play on my MP3 player to generate correct-order tracks, so this is significant to me. (And I acknowledge that "loosing" the publication date is not a big deal -- however, I am terribly OCD. )
If I understand this correctly, Mp3tag currently (≥ v2.58) writes YEAR field only to TYER (or TDRC in ID3v2.4) and can contain any kind of arbitrary value, while TDAT is not connected in any way to YEAR field.
If that is so, then the YEAR field's mapping in Help needs to be updated because it still maps it to TYER + TDAT.