Hi,

First off wanted to say a big thank you to the developers at 2ManyRobots for this amazing application. Finally I can edit my music files in bulk with the bonus of being able to create highly customisable actions - it's a godsend! 😀 Also, I just realised how lengthy this post has become, but rest assured, it's a simple problem I'm experiencing 🙂

Background:

Having spent many hours editing and perfecting the tags for my music files, I I uploaded my music library to Google Music. It was only then that I began to notice that the Year value for all of my music were not showing on Google Music. Initially, I thought this was an error on Google's server side having issues reading the Year value of the music files as iTunes correctly showed the Year of my tracks/albums without issue after editing with Yate. However, after a few days of trying to figure out why it wasn't reading the Year value of my tracks and Google's tech support telling me to check my tags thoroughly, I'm almost sure I've found the suspect.

The issue/bug:

Basically, whenever I edit an .mp3 file with Yate, it somehow cleans a field related to the year of the track. In Finder, this is shown as "Year Recorded" and can be viewed by clicking on Get Info (CMD+i) for the mp3 file or via Finder's View Options to show the "Year Recorded column". I noticed that an mp3 track which already has a "Year Recorded" is removed whenever the file has been edited by Yate. Changing the title or even the Year would remove the "Year Recorded" date and it will no longer exist.

The same issue does not appear for .aac files when you edit it's metadata and the "Year Recorded" field is successfully changed by Yate when you change the "Year" field in Yate.

So from what I can see, Yate is correctly editing the "Year Recorded" field for a .aac file but deletes that field for a .mp3 file whenever a .mp3 file is saved with Yate.

I can confirm that .mp3 files do have a "Year Recorded" field as some of my mp3 files not edited with Yate show a Year Recorded value in Finder. What it's called at a root level (or if it's called the same) I'm not sure, Finder just displays this info as "Year Recorded". But this is the culprit I've confirmed that is causing Google Play Music not being able to read/display the Year of my tracks/albums because it is using that specific data as the source of the Year of the tracks. In addition, Finder seems to be using that field when you search files through the Mac's Spotlight feature.

Side notes/findings:

- I know that the "Release Time"/"Original Release Time" does not change/is not the "Year Recorded" field in Finder.
- I use the term "Year Recorded" as that's what it's called in Finder. Have no idea if that is the same as the field used to store the Year of the track or whether it's a different field altogether embedded in the file.

I appreciate that for many this isn't something they'd bother about as they use iTunes and it's displaying fine in iTunes. But at a more rooted level, the lack of a Year is causing issues. I'm guessing that this was an oversight in coding as it seems to set the Year Recorded perfectly fine with .aac files but doesn't do so with .mp3 files, but I'll leave it to the experts to at 2ManyRobots to correct me 🙂

I would be extremely grateful if this bug could be fixed as for me, it feels as though Yate has destroyed all my Year data (although it's fine on iTunes). I'm sure it's a simple fix 🙂

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions of re-embedding the "Year Recorded" as a temporary solution, it would be much appreciated.

Thank you (and sorry for the lengthy post).!! 😉

Oops. There is also a sample action called ID3 v2.4-->v2.3 which will do the same and is more efficient as it will only rewrite files which are stored as v2.4.

Edit: ok, maybe I took it too far with the smooching business, but thank you!