Hi, I am trying to set YATE the way that it will add release year into my apple music library and I have got a couple of questions.

So I started with these articles:

https://2manyrobots.com/YateResources/YateDoc/Working-with-Apple-Apps-The-Basics.html

https://2manyrobots.com/YateResources/InAppHelp/Linking.html

And I wanna ask this a out those:

1.Once I am done with changing the tags in YATE I can re-check back the
-Keep Music Media folder organized
-Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library
options and the files will keep the tags I added?

2.If I drag files from SONGS list in Music App and my songs have got plenty metadata (except the year release obviously) can I use linking by METADATA by unchecking “Prefer PIDs when linking”? Is it that simple to turn of PID linking?

3.Field of interest in Apple Apps settings of YATE is about “extra” stuff I wanna be changing? So I can leave it blank if I want and still have the standard fields (like release year) available?



4.Auto Import in Apple Apps settings of YATE can be also left blank if I do not want PID link?

5.Auto Export in Apple Apps settings of YATE can be also left blank?

I suppose once this has been set now I can start tagging my 8000+ songs.

So let’s say I drag the first thousand of them - songs should get automatically linked if I drag them from apple music SONG list, right?

After this step I need guidance on how to achieve changing just the year of release and leaving the rest of tags as they are. Is there a way how to do that automatically for all selected songs? Also is there a way how to do it manually one by one on some more problematic tracks?

I need step by step by guide for both scenarios, please, because there is just tons of options in the menu.

... also, remember that the Save icon pre-installed on the toolbar, saves all modified files not just those that are selected. If you only want to save modified selected files, there is a Save Selected toolbar icon which is available or you can use File>Save Selected Files>Save if Modified.

Your suggestion of using Apple Music Suite means I am going to get year of release from the Apple Music streaming service? If so that is good for the recent stuff (like 2010+) but older albums' years of releases are oftentimes wrong in there.

That is more or less true for Discogs and MusicBrainz as well. With these services you are matching against releases. Each release can contain identical tracks but may have widely different release year metadata.

The remaining services (MusicBrainz, Discogs and AcousticID) should be able to find the right albums even if it is a Single Album or even if I own only 1 or 2 tracks from the whole Full-length Album as long as the tags (artist, album, track number...) are right, is that so?

AcoustID looks up a fingerprint of the track which is then matched against its database and is used to extract MusicBrainz IDs. So AcoustID is based on recordings. MusicBrainz and Discogs would be used to match a release and yes you need not have full albums. However, if you are operating unattended, the release which gets selected is somewhat arbitrary.

1. You really should read up on the Open Mode as it controls how files are opened. Do a Help>Search Yate Help. Search for Open Mode and select the The Open Mode topic in the long list of results. To modify the Open Mode, there is an Open Mode toolbar item and File>Open Mode always works.

2. This depends on the approach you want to take.

3. Same as 2.

Are you trying to get the earliest release date of your songs (independent of album) and save that to the Year field? Do you just want one of possibly many correct album centric release dates to be saved to Year?

I wrote a sample action to use Yate's Earliest Release Date from MusicBrainz functionality. The function downloads pages of recordings which return a match for the Album and Artist metadata. The logic does a fuzzy match of the metadata (currently set to accept an 80% match as success). It then extracts the earliest release date from the successful matches. Like most things in tagging, this is not 100% foolproof. However, it has been found to have very good results.

This is a slow process. 100 potential matches are downloaded in each search. Some recordings have multiple pages of matches ... potentially thousands. I've configured the action to only download one page of matches per song. If you want to change the action to download everything ... let me know. MusicBrainz is rate limited. As I said, this will be a slow process.

I've also left the extracted year however it was formatted. If you want the extracted year to always be YYYY (as opposed to possibly YYYY-MM-DD...) let me know.

Download the file at: https://2manyrobots.com/actions/Get-Earliest-Release-Date-to-the-Year-Field.zip

Drag the zip file to the main window's file list area to import it. (Alternately do a Yate>Import Settings, enable All items and select the zip file).

Perform the workflow that you want to use. ie. dragging from Music. Select whatever files you want to run the action on. Run the Get Earliest Release Date to the Year Field action. There's a variety of ways to do this including Actions>User Defined>Get Earliest Release Date to the Year Field. If a file's Year field has changed, the associated change indicator will be red.

The action does not save the files. You can always revert them to their pre run state by doing an Edit>Revert to Initial State. Save the files to commit the changes. If the files are linked when saved, Music will be updated.

Try it on a few files first. Any pre-existing value in the Year field is lost.

Nope, your change may work but it will mess up the internals. Install the action again to overwrite whatever your did.

Open the Action Manager. Actions>Action Manager

Select the line with Get Earliest Release Date to the Year Field. Double click on the line to open the action in an editor window. (or select Open from the context menu).

Select line 15 which I put in as disabled. (The line starts with a #). From the context menu select Enable/Disable>Enable Selected Statements

Save the changes via ⌘S (or File>Save).

That's it. Close the window.