There are a lot of assumptions here. One is that there is a unique master. There should be ... but lots of times there are multiple masters ... especially if it's an older album which may have had hundreds of releases over the years. Also, release variants which have different track counts often end up with different masters.

Regardless, it is possible to do what you're asking for. However actually changing the wizard at this point will take time. This can easily be done by an action.

The only requirement is that you import the Master Id when using the wizard.

I've written an action to do the following:

- all selected tracks which have a Discogs Master ID retained will be processed
- on a per Master ID basis, the release year metadata will be extracted from the master. (Note that the Master is formatted the same as a release and only has one release year item). If the extracted date is different from the content's of a track's Year field, it will be saved to the Original Release Time field.

You can run the action on multiple selected actions at a time.

If you want to run the action automatically every time you import from Discogs, you can configure it in Settings-Discogs-Advanced.

The action is named Extract Original Release Time from Discogs Master and you can download it at:

https://2manyrobots.com/actions/Extract-Original-Release-Time-from-Discogs-Master.zip

Let me know how it goes.

I tried the action provided, but I think I started all this off with a misunderstanding (btw, I never tried the .vbr script I mentioned so I was making assumptions) or was unclear, or both. To put it in loose terms, if my lady friend and I are listening to a remastered CD that I've "ripped", released last year, of an album that was originally released in 1974 (on vinyl no less) and she asks "when did this album first come out" then I'd like to be able to look at an OriginalDate tag in the file for that CD and see 1974. If she also asks "great, but when did this new fabulous-sounding remastered CD of the album come out" then I'd like to be able to look at the Year tag in the file for that CD and see 2025.

In any event, I tried the new action for a couple of Japanese CDs that were remastered relative to original releases for those albums (the albums were originally released in the U.S., as vinyl LPs). But nothing appeared to change in the tags relative to the tags created via the standard Discogs Wizard action for those CDs - that is, no OriginalDate tag was created / populated, and the Year field in the tag was populated with the date the remastered CDs were released.

I looked at Discogs on the web for those CDs and noticed that, while they have a Release ID at the upper right corner of the page, nothing is listed as a Master ID. To get the Master ID I had to click the "See all versions" link (beneath the Release ID) first. Once there, I could see the year that the respective album was originally released (as mentioned, original release was on vinyl which is fine). THAT is the date (year or exact date doesn't matter to me) that I'd like to see in an OriginalDate tag for the CD I am tagging. To be clear, I don't want the Year tag to change anywhere - I'd like that to continue to contain the date (again, year or exact date doesn't matter to me) the remastered CD was released just like the Yate Discogs Wizard action currently populates it.

I'm confident you already know this, but sometimes the Discogs comments for remastered versions also mention the year that the underlying album was first released, so while parsing text can't be easy and may not even be possible I suppose that would be another source that could be used to populate an OriginalDate tag if a Master ID is unavailable.

I didn't intend this to create a huge ordeal for you, but it would be nice to have and I appreciate the effort. Besides the my "lady friend" anecdote above, I noticed that Roon (which I use) will read an OriginalDate tag and include that (along with the date of the actual release - e.g., the remastered version date - being listened to) in its UI display of whatever is "now playing". I don't know if Roon will pluck this "original" date from somewhere if the file tags don't include it because I am tightly wound and thus tell Roon to use my file tags instead of trying to figure out the metadata on its own.

Thank you.

The method is sound. I just tried it with a 2012 remaster of The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan & The Band. The action extracted 1975 as the Original Release Time.

As I said, get me the Album and Album Artist name and I'll have a look. You can post the info here or send it to me at support@2manyrobots.com

Oh boy, I see what I did wrong. When I thought I checked the box for Master ID in the Yate Discogs Wizard I did not notice that it just changed to a minus sign. Once I enabled that correctly, your action worked as hoped. Sorry for the waste of your time on that, and thanks again.