Lost Precision Info for Date Fields?

[dominiksta]

Hi and thanks for the great work on this amazing library!

I'm hacking on a personal music streaming server and I think I noticed a little shortcoming in the way that DateTimes are handled: When using a tagger such as Picard, the user can set a "date" field without specifying a day or month, e.g. "2019-03" or just "2019". In ATL, "2019-03" will be read as "2019-03-01" with no way to access the actual value afterwards.

I am aware that there is a separate "year" field, but I don't think there is a "month" field in any version of ID3. I also can't seem to find a way to access the raw string values of these fields to implement this myself.

I would personally love to have something like a enum DatePrecision { Year, Month, Day } exposed as DatePrecision, OriginalReleaseDatePrecision and PublishingDatePrecision or something like that.

Am I on the right track here or is there something I'm missing?

[Zeugma440]

Hi and thanks for your feedback~

What you're seeing is the result of a conscious choice on my side :

• As you said, there are many tagging standards that do not allow partial information to be written; only full timestamps
• I'd like to keep the high-level API as simple as possible, for any developer to find his way with the library

What you're suggesting looks like clean design to me, but I'm not sure I'd like to implement that for what seems to be a niche use case (you're the first person to actually ask about that, sorry~).

---

I also can't seem to find a way to access the raw string values of these fields to implement this myself.

That we can work on! You can use the low-level API to do that - try the following

using ATL.AudioData.IO;
using ATL.AudioData;

AudioDataManager theFile = new AudioDataManager(AudioDataIOFactory.GetInstance().GetFromPath(fileLocation));

Assert.IsTrue(theFile.ReadFromFile(true, true));

// You'll need to adjust that if you're looking for something else than ID3v2
IMetaDataIO theMeta = theFile.ID3v2;

Assert.IsNotNull(theMeta);
Assert.IsTrue(theMeta.Exists);

((MetaDataHolder)theMeta).tagData.ToMap(); // <-- here you'll get all raw values

Let me know if that works for you~