# "Release Date" in iTunes??
**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/release-date-in-itunes/19403
**Category:** General Discussion
**Created:** [October 2, 2017, 11:52am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/release-date-in-itunes/19403 "2017-10-02T11:52:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jsa307](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/jsa307)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2017, 11:52am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/release-date-in-itunes/19403/1 "2017-10-02T11:52:41Z")
Hi-
I'm new to mp3tag, but not digital music. I am trying to figure out how to separately populate the "Release Date" field in iTunes - searching the forum here (and elsewhere) has yielded incomplete results. Some have suggested that it is populated from the "RELEASETIME" field, from the extended tags menu (using YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ format). Others have added that this only works for mp3 files.
A purchased AAC track from the Apple store indeed uses the "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ" format, but it is entered into the year field; this populates the full date into "Release Date" and just YYYY into "Year"
I would like to have separate data for the "Year" and "Release Date" in iTunes. Is this possible?? Thank you!
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### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2017, 12:29pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/release-date-in-itunes/19403/2 "2017-10-02T12:29:49Z")
See the list of fields and their user-friendly names: [https://docs.mp3tag.de/mapping](https://docs.mp3tag.de/mapping)
The problem is: there is no field "Release Date".
There are only 2 fields for such a time coordinate: YEAR and RELEASETIME.
If you want to get the first 4 digits into the field YEAR, you could try an action of the type "Format value" for YEAR
Format string: $left(%releasetime%,4)
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### Author:  [@jsa307](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/jsa307)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2017, 1:46pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/release-date-in-itunes/19403/3 "2017-10-02T13:46:41Z")
thanks very much. i see what you mean- so, in short, there is no way to separately populate the "release date" field in itunes with a different value from the "year" field? correct?
thanks again!
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### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2017, 1:51pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/release-date-in-itunes/19403/4 "2017-10-02T13:51:56Z")
> [@jsa307](#):
>
> thanks very much. i see what you mean- so, in short, there is no way to separately populate the "release date" field in itunes with a different value from the "year" field? correct?
>
> thanks again!
Ahm - no...
If you know what the field is called, then you can write more less any data to it.
The problem I see: as there is not standard field for "Releasedate", you would get a user-defined field which iTunes most likely will not display.
So what you need is some kind of template a file that has the "Releasedate" already set.
For this file, open the extended tags dialogue (Alt-T) and see which name that field has.
You then can use that name for the other files and hopefully, iTunes picks it up.