I specifically work with MP3 and Opus for lossy, and Flac for lossless.
I've been searching for hours, but my google-fu is slipping (no thanks to google becoming objectively worse over the years). If I missed a huge resource for this, accept my apologies and please point me.
I understand that my tagging preferences, if used only by me, do not matter, so long as they work; my entire metadata structure could be custom tags, and if they sort properly, then great!
I understand there is no true "standard", which is why there's often confusion with these questions and requests. I know there are many different systems, all sharing commonalities, but with different syntax.
My question/request (requestion?): I tend to share my files with loved ones, and I don't want my tagging system to get in the way of folks that use a basic player for their songs. So, I'm looking for the most common tags to use for indicating three specific dates:
Original release date
Current release date
Live performance date
Por ejemplo, let's take the track "Living in the Past", from Jethro Tull's live album "A Little Light Music".
The album originally came out 1992-09-14
The remaster came out 2006-09
The track was performed live 1992-05-02
I would default to:
%YEAR% 2006-09
%ORIGINALDATE% 1992-09-14
Are there better/more compatible tags for that? I don't mind dupes, if they make things better for compatibility.
The live thing I just don't know. I see "TRDA" for, what I think(?), is %RECORDINGDATE%. I just don't know anything about it, and I've unfortunately reached a saturation point that lead me to post this thread.
Thank you in advance for any assistance, and if you got this far, regardless, thank you kindly for your time.
Then perhaps a look at the ID3 standard definition page(s) would be useful: https://id3.org/id3v2.3.0
There you find a list of defined tag tokens.
For these you would find TYER and TORY with the definition:
TYER
The 'Year' frame is a numeric string with a year of the recording. This frames is always four characters long (until the year 10000).
Which means that your ideas are in fact not standard-compliant as it has more than 4 digits.
You could probably use TRDA, only that this is not supported by MP3tag.
RELEASETIME is the only field that allows more than 4 digits.
See more about supported fields in the documentation
In addition to the advise of @ohrenkino:
It depends on the hard-/software player functions of your loved ones.
If you want to be sure that your work is useful, you should ask them what kind of player they use.
Not all player support all type of tags, especially not special ones like "Current release date" or "Live performance date".
Especially portable and car players that at best support only the YEAR field. This is typically considered to be the year the album in question was originally released. Adding a differentiator such as "[2006 Remaster]" to the Album field may be of use.
Other than a couple of desktop media library managers, there is little to no support for the TORY or TRDA fields that others users would be able to access. Even in mp3tag they are useful only to the owner of the library.
Being able to find the mapping table (Tag Field Mappings Table – Mp3tag Documentation) thanks to that link, has been a definite help, thank you kindly. Having gone through a bunch of tables like that (including a massive spreadsheet across many different tagging systems), and having MP3tag for years, I still never found that specific page.
The ID3 standards page is a help, yeah, but it all ends up blending together so much over time (for me), that I sometimes feel my initial "use whatever, if it works it doesn't matter" mentality is the only one conducive to staying sane, heh.
I'll dive into it again a little later, but thank you again for your time 8^)
Yeah, most of the tags I want to use are for my own personal archival records, and file naming scheme. Long story short, despite having a very robust folder structure for my library, I'm devising a way to name my files so that if they were all put together in one folder, they'd still sort properly (in theory; sometimes file length gets in the way).
Ultimately if this is done using something like... ..\YourMainMusicLibraryFolder\%albumartist%\%album%\[%discnumber%-]%track% %title%
...you should essentially get a completely sorted library under one main library folder.
I would caution against the idea of keeping all files under one single folder. Besides being extremely difficult to manage as your library grows, it also makes it challenging to monitor specific changes. If your files have the tag information, it is simple to let mp3tag manage this renaming process.
I also use letter folders to make navigation even easier (J/JethroTull/...)
Sometimes I have large projects running in MP3Tag, and sorting by filename in-program is a reset shortcut when things get thrown off. I also like naming files so that, if there was no metadata, you would be able to glean almost everything from the filename.