[X] MP3: Replay gain tagging wipes out ORIGYEAR value

#1

I'm using v2.39j. My tagging options are to write ID3V2.3 ISO-8859-1 (and no ID3V1 tags).

I am using the ORIGYEAR tag to store the year a disc or album was released and the YEAR tag for the year the song was originally recorded. I know this isn't perfect, but it's the most compatible with the other players that I use; both software and hardware.

I have noticed something strange: I usually go through all of my tagging with Mp3tag, and then calculate replay gain in Winamp. When Winamp writes the replay gain tags, it wipes out the ORIGYEAR value. I tried the same thing with Foobar, setting its tagging option to the "non-specification compliant" mode to make it write v2.3 tags (instead if its default, which is 2.4). It does the same thing.

Don't know if this a bug or not...

#2

No, certainly not in Mp3tag. Both programs remove the field. Winamp probably because it doesn't know it and foobar because of (in)compatibility mode.

I recommend you turn that compatibility mode off in foobar, let it write v2.4 tags and then use Mp3tag to convert the tags to v2.3 again (just save the tags again [Ctrl+S])
foobar RG calculation should also be faster than Winamp.

#3

I thought about it after the post and realized it probably wasn't a bug on the Mp3tag side. I'm continuing to use Winamp to calculate replay gain. It is only marginally slower than foobar and returns essentially the same values. I have an action to add back the release year.

I think this is much simpler and safer than converting from 2.4 back to 2.3. My experience has been that some tags, especially date tags get 'FUBAR'ed (pun intended) with the conversion. I have also gone through 'tag cut', 'tag paste' to clean up from 2.4 to 2.3 and sometimes find multiple layers of tags (i.e., the cut doesn't completely remove all tags.)