NEW: Year to Album of Selected Track v1.0

l still buy and rip CDs. And frequently these days the CDs are remastered or recompiled or back-filled with back catalog, and so on. I find it slightly irritating that sometimes the Year tag for these tracks is from the release date of the reconstituted CD rather than the year of original release. I get why some people prefer this. But I do not. Sometimes I can fix the Year if I notice it post rip. But more than likely it will be, ahem, years before I notice.

This can screw up a Smart or Genius playlist, too. And that's generally how I'll notice it; I'm expecting tracks from a particular era but they don't show up because they were released in the future. Arggh.

In order to swat this predicament whenever I come across it on-the-fly, I wrote a script, Year to Album of Selected Track, that will use the selected or playing track's album and artist tags to identify its album track mates in the library and batch-change their Year tag to the one I enter.

Thus, whenever I notice that a lonely album track in a playlist has the wrong Year, I can update the whole album without the "Show Album in Library" ado. And indeed there can be a lot of ado.

Exceptions/Deal Breaker? Yes: perhaps obviously, an album of tracks with more than a single artist name will produce errant results. Both album name and artist are used to unambiguously identify a particular whole album where, ostensibly, each track has the same artist tag. But in the cases of some compilation albums, or albums with augmented artist tags (such as including a "feat" artist or soloist), only the tracks that match the artist and album name from the selected or playing track will be updated—and that could mean only the selected or playing track gets updated! Just sayin'.

More information for Year to Album of Selected Track v1.0 and download link is here.