Duplicate year help

[Musicmatters]

For most users I expect this is a soft issue. There are backup reasons etc why I am trying to understand this.

When I edit a file - eg a track title, etc no matter what, when I look in mp3tag or even Windows 7 explorer pop-ups I see eg 2002\\2000 or 2002;2002 respectively. Leaving aside I believe something is syncing tags unexpectedly in my case I understand the duplicate years are due to MM's default id3 tag settings and it is done to assure compatibility. Personally I would prefer it only changed the tags I edit.

However, the MM KB says to use the following in your ini file to stop the problem if this bothers you:

[MP3Tagging]
DisableFrames=TDRC;TDOR;
EnableFrames=TYER;TDAT;TORY;

Which I have done.

I then found some albums and tracks I wanted to correct. I selected the tracks, and used Tools > Advanced Tag Management > Synchornize tags. The progress bar zipped along and I looked at the result. Curious.

The tracks I had never changed and only had one year still have only one year

The tracks I have modified (recently) in MM that had two years still have two years.

Now what happens if I edit a track:

If the track hasn't been changed in MM and has a single year visible in Windows, and I then edit it, it sticks with one year No more duplicate years.
If the track has two years visible in the WIndows pop-up or id tag properties, I then edit the year field (or any other field) in MM, I still see two year dates in Windows - both to the new date

In other words the fix-up (synch) didn't work (actually it did on one downloaded mp3 album - poss that had some other tag set up). I tried it on another album I have edited - synced - no change.

Any ideas how I can correct the impacted music files - coerce them to a single year tag?

Sometimes I wonder why I am bugged so much by all this except I am seeing unedited albums that have changed to double years forcing additional backup. I do not know what is provoking this as this is occurring in unedited files (could be due to other bugs I have been experiencing). If this was impacting other people they would probably not pick up on it and it is pretty harmless.

Finally - looking back over 3 years of music I can see edits about a year ago also resulting in duplicate yeara. If I go back to 2011, to music I have definitely edited in MM, I see single year dates. In fact if nothing else I always use my own art work and embed it using MM and often change genres. Almost everything in my library has been edited at one time or another in MM - it is a key tool for me. It does suggest something has changed.

[Musicmatters]

Adding after some more work tidying my library, noting I still have the ini [MP3Tagging] section inserted as above:

It is not as predictable as I have written. In fact it seems almost random. eg - I have 3 disks in a compilation and they haven't been edited for years, and they show a single year date in WIndows or Mp3tag. In MM I use auto organize files to force the filenames to read as <tracknum> <artist> - <title>, then use tag from filename using <tracknum> <title>. I do this to all 3 disks. The tracks now have titles reading as <artist> - <title> for all 3 disks. I have in effect preserved the artists in the titles. Now I selectively edit the artists in the tracks for the 3 disks to set those I want out of my indexed artists to "Various Artists". I leave the track artist alone if I have other stuff by the same artist. Less artist noise. Wouldn't it be nice if id3 tags had primary artist(s) and secondary artist(s) tags and media software, players, servers etc only expose/index the primary artists...

So lots of edits, over 3 disks, all with the same workflow.

Now I look in mp3tag or windows explorer - and guess what - all tracks on 1 disk have a single date - looks like all the year tags for the tracks on that disk are unaffected by the edit, fine. However, the other 2 disks have all tracks now with duplicate years. Go figure. I use MP3Tag to fix the MM duplicate years in the two errant albums.

I am more and more becoming inclined to thinking this is a defect (and possibly confined to 64bit - unsure yet)