Windows 7 - The 'year' field in mp3 properties

Hello,

I have a large number of mp3's that have been recorded over the years. In XP, I wanted to give each mp3 a specific 'original recording date'. I used the 'year' field and gave it a date in this format... 2007/05/22. I could then sort properly.

In Windows 7, however, when I add 'year' column to the properties and look at the same files, I only see 2007, not the full date. When I try to edit the 'year' field, Windows responds with 'unacceptable character', probably referring to the /.

I can do without the / (20070522), but I do need the full date, not just the year.

Does anyone have any ideas how to deal with this?

Many thanks

Hi chanterlampman and welcome to Windows 7 Forums

Try using the underscore character instead. So 2007/05/22 will become 2007_05_22

When I try to key in an underscore, Windows responds with "unacceptable character, you can only type a number here".

Assuming that is true, does anyone have a script to move the data in "year" to another field, such as 'subtitle" or to strip out the /?

Thanks again!

Seems like it really isn't what was intended for that field:

TYER: The 'Year' frame is a numeric string with a year of the recording. This frame is always four characters long (until the year 10000).

You can actually enter more characters in that field (I've used other programs, like MP3Tag, Roxio's "Edit Audio Tags" (which for some reason gets invoked on my machine when I right-click on an MP3 in Explorer and select "edit song information"), and I've stored "YYYY-MM-DD" in there. Both MP3Tag and the Roxio program accept the hyphen and save and display the now-extended date, but the extended date does not show in Explorer.

Winamp will not allow the entry of anything other than a number in that field (using it's "file info" editor).

As far as using some other variable character field for holding this extended information and mass-copying the field transfer automatically, I can't help you there. But I don't know of any other field than the "big ones" which will be supported by portable music players or other Windows media player programs, which you could transfer this data to and still have it visible somehow.

That's for a great and prompt response! It's becoming clear that I should not have used the 'year' field as a place to store extended date information. As stated in the original post, the extended date does show in Windows Explorer in XP, but not in Windows Explorer in 7. I think I will have to bite the bullet and manually move this date to a known text field such as 'subtitle' which should show in all versions in Windows explorer.

I will also look for some freeware which might do this for me.

Many thanks!