Issue when importing files with non-number year tags

[Auranium64]

Hello. I'm having issues regarding my music library which I have recently brought over from MusicBee. With my personal tagging system, albums by the same album artist that were released in the same year have a letter added to them. For instance, The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band is tagged with the year "1967a" while Magical Mystery Tour is tagged with "1967b", this is to guarantee chronological organization without having to input exact release dates for every album in my collection.

MusicBee, while showing my a tiny warning about how the year tag was "invalid", accepted it anyways, organizing the folders in the following way for the above example:

The Beatles/(1967a) - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles/(1967b) - Magical Mystery Tour

However, with beets, the "unorthodox" year tags are being seemingly ignored, and being organized as follows:

The Beatles/(0000) - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles/(0000) - Magical Mystery Tour

What could I do about this? Here's my current configuration:

plugins: vtalbumartist inline

directory: /home/auran/drive/Music
library: /home/auran/Music/musiclibrary.db
import:
    move: no
    copy: yes
    write: yes
    autotag: no
    log: beetslog.txt
art_filename: Cover

paths:
    default: $albumartist/($year) - $album/$disc_and_track. $title

format_item: $albumartist - $album - $title
format_album: $albumartist - $album - $year

sort_item: albumartist+ year+ album+ disc+ track+
sort_album: albumartist+ year+ album+

per_disc_number: yes

item_fields:
    disc_and_track: u'%02i-%02i' % (disc, track) if
                    disctotal > 1 else u'%02i' % (track)

Thank you in advance.

[jackwilsdon]

beets stores year as a numeric value - you could maybe look at using a custom field like so:

$ beet modify "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" custom_year=1967a
$ beet modify "Magical Mystery Tour" custom_year=1967b

And then using that in your path instead:

paths:
    default: $albumartist/($custom_year) - $album/$disc_and_track. $title

You could even have it fall back to the normal year field if a custom year hasn't been specified:

paths:
    default: $albumartist/(%ifdef{custom_year,$custom_year,$year}) - $album/$disc_and_track. $title

[Auranium64]

so I'd have to do that for every album I have a custom year for manually?

[jackwilsdon]

Is your custom year currently stored in the file's tags or is it just in the folder name? I did some testing with the TYER ID3 field but it seems like beets doesn't recognise that field (it actually pulls year from the TDRC field).

Either way you'd most likely have to write a custom beets plugin to get it to recognise the year and put it in a custom field for you.

[Auranium64]

It would seem like it's indeed stored in the TYER field. Any way I could detect that tag with Inline or would I have to just figure out a custom plugin myself for that?

[jackwilsdon]

Have you already imported the media or are you looking for a way to import it? It seems like if you ask beets to actually write tags back to the file, it will have blown away the TYER field.

[Auranium64]

Unfortunately I have indeed written to the files, so the TYER tag is missing I've been manually readding the year tag to every release I have that doesn't a year tag right now, although I might run it through the autotagger to get exact dates to be safe.