I recently archived my CD collection to FLAC and transcoded some of those to Ogg Vorbis for casual listening. I tagged the files with the Tag command-line editor (http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/html/tag.html) and soon discovered that Winamp3's Medial Library wasn't properly reading the year of any of the Ogg files (it doesn't read much of anything properly from FLAC files, a fault that seems to be on the part of Winamp because they haven't done much with documenting how the new input plugins should work, and not the fault of the FLAC developers). I was curious to see if I could find another Media Library-style application, so I tried dBpowerAMP. While dBpowerAMP seemed to be able to read tags from both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files, it still would not read the year.
Looking into the problem further, and inspecting the Ogg Vorbis documentation (http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html), I discovered that the specs have a "DATE" comment field rather than a "YEAR" comment field, and by using vorbiscomment and metaflac I found that Tag did indeed create a tag of the form "DATE=2002", which complies with the Vorbis specification. However, Winamp3 and dBpowerAMP seem to be looking for "YEAR=2002", a suspicion confirmed by using vorbiscomment to append a "YEAR=2002" tag to an Ogg Vorbis file, or by using metaflac to append "YEAR=2002" to a FLAC file. While I haven't tried many audio players (Winamp 2.81 reads "date" just fine, by the way), I suspect this date/year ambiguity might be causing problems for other programs.
While I suppose I could forcibly add the "YEAR" tag to my FLAC and Ogg files to comply with the players I've used so far, it seems to me that the software I use should comply to the Vorbis documentation. (Besides, I really don't want to have to re-tag all this stuff. Would you?) The flexibility of the Vorbis spec could cause some problems here, however, because they don't limit "DATE" to a four-digit year. In fact, the date could be something like "September 22, 2002", "09/22/2002", or even something as useless as "A Week Ago Last Thursday". While that kind of flexibility is nice, when you're using a media library-type application it makes sorting by year quite difficult.
So is this a problem that others have already encountered? What's the best way to deal with it? I'm just curious about how others feel about this problem, and how other audio software deals with it. Anybody know of any software that handles it all correctly?