Roon uses 3 date tags
Released - This appears to be mapped to the YEAR tag available in all other tagging apps. Roon sets this to the release of this print of the album
Originally Released - Roon sets this to the original release date of this edition of the album.
Date Recorded - This is not always set.
Neither of the last 2 are easily edited in other tagging applications.
In Focus Roon uses the ‘Original Release’ Date to filter the results.
I use date a lot in my smart playlists, and I find it very useful in Focus. However using the ‘Originally Released’ tag causes problems for me.
e.g I have the MFSL CD of Little Richard’s ‘Here’s Little Richard’, which Roon says (and I’m sure it’s correct) was originally released in 2006.
But I don’t want to hear Little Richard when I’m focusing on music from 2006. I want to hear it when I’m focusing on music from the 50s.
There is a similar problem with Greatest hits collections. These are invariably released much later than the songs were current. Ideally I would want Focus to know what year the song came from.
Now you can tell Roon to use file tags. But as the ‘Originally Released’ tag (I’m not even that sure what it is) is not available in other tag editing software (I use iTunes), that doesn’t really help.
If Focus used the ‘Released’ tag instead, it would be easy to set the values to your preferred date - I’ve already done this for YEAR in iTunes, and the filter would work the way you wanted.
My request would be to be able to choose which date tag to use in focus.
To me it would make the difference between Focus being merely fun and Focus being extremely useful.