I know that Original Release Date is an album property according to the metadata model. If the tracks of an album have different Original Release Date values Roon currently just uses the value from the first file it imported for that album, applies it on album level (*) and doesn’t bother about it any further. While that’s technically OK I wonder if it would make sense to expand the applicability of Original Release Date to the track level too - or if it would break the logic behind the property and a new field would be required to hold a track’s original release date?
The use case behind this: compilations often contain tracks with different original release dates. How can this information get captured and shown in Roon? It’s of special interest for cases where the original recording dates aren’t available (and which might be different from release dates).
(*) … Applying that value to all tracks of the album seems to be kind of wrong to me if the file tag contains a different value but it’s somehow within the logic, I suppose. Still - since in the track browser the values shown for “Release Date” are actually the “Original Release Date” values (if available, I guess) …
For me - even so I have an idea why it it how it is - it’s an issue to discuss first. If it warrants a feature request I don’t know. But it’s of course up to the moderators to decide what to do with the entry.
At this time things are working as designed here, so I’ve moved this post over to #roon:feature-requests. Our team keeps a close eye on request in this category, and it’s a great place to get other feedback from the Community.
Just for further reference the design here is:
if the preference is set to “prefer file” ORIGINALRELEASEDATE is taken from the tag of the file first imported for a particular album – which doesn’t have to be the first track (track no. 1) of that album. No selection, no check or “fallback to empty” happens if the values vary from track to track.
The “cleanest” way would probably something like ORIGINALTRACKRELEASEDATE.
Or the Original Release Date would get shown as a range according to the track based values, but I’m not so sure about that.
I"m not sure I’d go with that. A compilation has its own release date and imho the Original Release Date should be the release date of the compilation, not based on the contained tracks. Take the American Graffitti soundtrack, while the original music release dates were a decade or more before the release of the soundtrack, I’d want the Original Release Date to be the release Date of the soundtrack, not a range stretching over a decade.
My scenario is simple, and maybe it’s possible to do this already, I’m not sure. Sometimes I may want to play tracks across my collection originally released in a particular year, and I would want this to be populated with tracks from compilations originally released in this particular year, as well as single artist albums released in this year.
Would be glad to know if this is possible already.