MinimServer with SongKong: Part 8: Configuring the Date Index

Part 9: Is Classical and other boolean fields
Part 7: Album Artist

The Date field generally stores the release date of the album. Note ID3v24 formats also have a ReleaseDate field but it is not generally used. By default MinimServer lists the date in descending order as follows:

But Date or any other field can easily be shown in ascending order by adding a '+' sign before the field name in the indexTags option

This now shows the date ordered the other way round

The Date value can be in dd-mm-yyyy, mm-yyyy or yyyy formats. Your file metadata may contain all three types , browsing can be made simpler by simply displaying only the year part and this can be done by adding 

 tagOptions:Date.yearOnly.index 

Now we have a grouping by year only which is more readable.

We may wish to browse by Original Date as well, this stores the date of the first release the song was released on, this is particularly useful when you have compilation albums or reissued albums.

We can add Original Date in the same way

You may only be interested in the Original Date and would like it as the Date, in this case you can map to Date using an aliasTag.

This works nicely within MinimServer but if you need to do this so your files metadata outside of MinimServer use Original Date as date then you can configure SongKong to always put Original Date into the Date field by enabling Use Original Release Date on the Album Format tab.