Remastered albums tagging Options

[SonicBooom!]

I just want to know other people's perspective. If you are ripping a remastered CD (eg. Dead Can Dance' Within the Realm of a Dying Sun, originally released 1987, re-released and remastered 2008), what do you indicate on the YEAR field? Is it the year of the original release or the release date of your remastered CD? And is there any "manual of style" for it? (I use manuals of style for proper tagging)

[bernhold]

Definitely the year in which the remastered version was released. Like a remix, I consider it to be a new artwork, the remastered songs are not the same as the old songs.

It's sometimes even necessary to be able to distinguish an old and a remastered album. If it's the same artist and the same album title in your playlist, you need a way to keep them apart.

The YEAR field should always indicate the year a production was released, not the year it was composed in my opinion.

This post has been edited by bernhold: Apr 14 2013, 18:58

[markanini]

Personally, I think it deserves it's own tag field, containg the year. label, and catalogue number. And a another field for the mastering engineer.

[Porcus]

I use the original release year, otherwise I would not have had any music from before the CD age on hard drive ... the Black Sabbath s/t is Friday 13th of February, 1970, period.
Then I augment e.g. [2005 reissue] or [2005 remaster] or [2005 remix] in the album name (interchange word and number if you want it sorted by the amount of processing!).

I should likely have used another field. Will maybe happen some time in the future ...

[mjb2006]

I often want to sort by the year the recording dates to, never the year of a particular remastering, reissue, or compilation. And I'm not always using foobar2000 where I can customize columns and display custom fields. So, I'm essentially on the same page as Porcus, populating the standard year field with the original year. And I do that on a per-song basis. However, I don't like comments in the album name, so I just use the comment field for the clarification note about the year of remaster/re-release/whatever.

The ID3v2 spec differentiates between TYER (year) and TORY (original release year), but, unsurprisingly, is clear as mud, talking about "cover versions", implying TORY is really the year of original composition, not recording.

This post has been edited by mjb2006: Apr 15 2013, 13:01

[slks]

In most cases I leave notes like remaster, remix, re-release, etc. in the comment tag. For most albums I only have one version, so it works. If I have multiple versions in my collection, I might append it to the album tag as well.

For example:
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [Mono]
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [Stereo]

or

The Soft Bulletin [5.1 Remix]
The Soft Bulletin [Original]

Even though they may come out in different years I usually don't find that important enough to include anywhere but the comments. It's really about just deciding where to draw the line between a re-mix and a re-master. I consider the first to be a new work artistically altered, the second just a re-transcribing with maybe some EQ.