# Reformating YEAR field
**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reformating-year-field/17926
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [May 6, 2016, 2:31pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reformating-year-field/17926 "2016-05-06T14:31:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@simonlok](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/simonlok)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2016, 2:31pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reformating-year-field/17926/1 "2016-05-06T14:31:58Z")
Hi, I have a bunch of old MP3 files that for whatever reason have the YEAR field formatted like this:
xxxx\\xxxx
Is there an easy way to automatically cut off everything after and including the '\\' so I can get a simple year?
for example
2016\\2016 -\> 2016
Thank you in advance!
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### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2016, 2:50pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reformating-year-field/17926/2 "2016-05-06T14:50:18Z")
The \\ is MP3tag's representation of a multi-value field: you have at least 2 fields of the type YEAR in the files.
There are action to either merge the fields to one field (use a different separator than \\) or to delete all duplicate fields.
Or you have a look at the extended tags dialogue (Alt-T) and see the fields there and decide which field to delete.
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### Author:  [@simonlok](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/simonlok)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2016, 2:55pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reformating-year-field/17926/3 "2016-05-06T14:55:53Z")
Removing duplicate field action did the trick --- thank you again!
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### Author:  [@system](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/system)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2021, 6:03pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reformating-year-field/17926/4 "2021-01-06T18:03:07Z")
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