Changing 'ID3' to 'tag' and 'year' to 'date'

[adam917]

As Rockbox supports other formats' tag schemes (Vorbis Comments for Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, & Speex, as well as the native tag formats of other supported codecs, I feel that it is inappropriate to call all tags 'ID3' at this point. Is this in the works in the menu/settings change?

Also, it would make more sense to change the label of the 'year' tag to 'date', as the more modern audio formats that Rockbox supports an actual date in the field; not just the year alone.

No need to change the WPS variables (or whatever they are called), though it might make sense to change the affected ones, provided this change occurs.

What does anyone here (especially heavy non-MP3-format users) think of this?

[linuxstb]

Renaming "ID3" to something more generic is agreed to be a good thing, it just needs someone to do it...

I'm not sure about the year/date issue - even though many tag formats support date, not all do, and afaik, most tagging software just puts the year in there anyway.

[Llorean]

Not to mention that Rockbox only makes use of the "Year" part of "Date" anyway, and assumes YYYY-blah format (it doesn't care what anything after the first four digits are, if I understand properly).

Anyway, this is all well and good, but both of these belong as separate feature requests, really.

[adam917]

Not to mention that Rockbox only makes use of the "Year" part of "Date" anyway, and assumes YYYY-blah format (it doesn't care what anything after the first four digits are, if I understand properly).

Anyway, this is all well and good, but both of these belong as separate feature requests, really.

Actually, when I play my FLAC & Vorbis files in there that have the full YYYY-MM-DD format, it shows all of it.

[roolku]

Database only indexes the year part though.

[safetydan]

There are two date related structures in the metadata for tracks in Rockbox.

The first one is the "date string" which stores the actual string found in the date related tag in the file. This is the one you see when you go to "Show ID3 Info" for a file. However, it's not used anywhere else in Rockbox.

The second one is the "year" field. This is an integer (a number basically) that is used by the database for sorting and grouping. I believe it's also the one used by the WPS. There is some code in the metadata reading that tries to generate a year from the above "date string" which is what Llorean is talking about.

So basically, since the date string in Ogg files and so forth can be in arbitrary format, Rockbox can't really use it for much. There's no guarantee we'll be able to turn it in to a usable date. So for now I think Rockbox will just stick with the year field.

[Lear]

The first one is the "date string" which stores the actual string found in the date related tag in the file. This is the one you see when you go to "Show ID3 Info" for a file. However, it's not used anywhere else in Rockbox.

The second one is the "year" field. This is an integer (a number basically) that is used by the database for sorting and grouping. I believe it's also the one used by the WPS. There is some code in the metadata reading that tries to generate a year from the above "date string" which is what Llorean is talking about.

The WPS (and the ID3 info screen) uses the string if there is one, otherwise it checks the numeric value. So it is really only the database that ignores the string.

[adam917]

Database only indexes the year part though.

This easily defeats the purpose of using the field for sorting, as multiple albums released in the same year may fall out of chronological without having something else to sort on after the year (and just going alphabetical for album names). :-( I guess I'll just stick to folders...

[safetydan]

The database couldn't really use the date string for sorting as there's no guarantee that it's a sortable format. For example, some people have their files tagged with mm/dd/yy format while others are dd-mm-yyyy, and some are even wackier with something like "Thursday, 13 March 1999". We can't deal with all possible combinations so the database just use the numeric year.