[REQ] regarding Date and Original Date

[ByTor 03]

Hello.

I am apologizing now for the below "novel". But I wanted to be clear in what I am asking for.

Although still a work in progress, I am enjoying MM5. The features and appearance have won me over. However, I would like to ask about a possible improvement to a current feature.

It is common knowledge that today, when an album is released, it will have a myriad of media types associated with a release date and a unique catalogue #.

When CD's came into prominence in the mid to late `80's, albums that were released in this new format may have had multiple release dates and catalogue #'s Ex. Record Clubs, Country of Mfg. Record Company Distributor's etc.

In the 'Files Properties' section of MM, there are two areas for dates. The 'Original Date', which can be used for the original release date of the original LP, 8-track, cassette etc. as well as a 'Date' area which can be used for the current release date of the title in a different format. Ex. A remaster or reissue etc.

In one's collection, there are times when trying to determine a specific release date for a specific catalogue # from the early to mid 80's may be limited to only a date range.

I have 100's of CD's in my collection from the early to mid 80's. It is near impossible to lock down an exact year for that particular CD release.

I know this MM field is tied to the actual MSW Operating System file. But can it be a stand-alone field in MM? Or, both date fields for that matter?

Can the date fields be changed to allow numbers AND text? To allow for general entry? Ex. "Unknown" or " '88-'93 ".

Thank you in advance for considering.

[MattTown]

I also use the Date and Original Date fields in the Basic panel of the Properties dialog box to represent "date that the media was produced" and "date that the album was first released" respectively. I have seen the problem that you're dealing with but I just put a year value in each, which is sufficient for my purposes.

Only the Devs could say for sure, but I can imagine that changing the data type of a core variable such as Date might be difficult, because data type has connections that go back into the definitions of tags in compressed file storage standards (eg mp3), and could also cause functionality complications within MM (eg search and sorting).

If you can't make text additions to the date fields work (I've never tried) I suggest that you look to the Custom Fields, available on the right hand tab of the Properties dialog box (Basic is the left hand tag, Custom is at the right). You have to set the names of the custom fields via Tools>Options>Library>Fields>Rename custom fields , but that's easy to do and then it will work well. Just remember to keep an external record of which field has which label, because some DB restoration processes can wipe the labels (not the data).

Cheers
Matt

[Ludek]

Hi,
yes, feel free to use one of the custom files (1-10) for the purposes

[ByTor 03]

Thank you both MattTown and Ludek for the suggestions.

Much appreciated.