Checks: Album Fields¶

This section is only for "generic" per-album fields that should be the same on all tracks, or not present. There are more checks for fields that need to be the same per album (e.g. "album" and "album-artist"), but those are not generic.

Per-album field checks all share a purpose: if one of these fields is set inconsistently on tracks in an album, some players treat this as distinct albums. So each of these fields should be set to the same value, or not set.

Common Behavior¶

Each check applies a user-defined policy for the corresponding field. The "presence" policy options are:

"consistent": either all tracks have the field, or none do
"always": all tracks should have the field
"never": the field should be removed

If any track has a value, then all values must be the same.

Automatic fix: If the policy is "never", always remove the field. If the policy is "consistent" or "always", and a consistent value is set but only on some tracks, set that value on the tracks which have no value. And if the policy is "consistent" but no single value is identified, remove the field from all tracks.

Option	Default	Description
`presence`	`"consistent"`	Set the field presence policy

album-sort, album-artist-sort¶

These are sort order fields; see Sort Order Fields for details.

barcode¶

See above for details on this per-album field check.

publisher¶

See above for common behavior of this check.

Dependency

Requires the legacy-fields check to pass first.

release-country, release-type¶

See above for common behavior of this check.

Warning

The release country and release type fields are only mapped for files that use Vorbis Comment tags (e.g. FLAC, Ogg). So if one album has a mix of track types where some use Vorbis Comment and others don't, the presence setting will be ignored for that album and the field will be removed if present.

release-date¶

See above for common behavior of this check.

The release date field is mapped for every supported track type: Vorbis Comment date (FLAC, Ogg), ID3 TDRC (MP3, AIFF), MP4 aard (M4A) and ASF WM/Year (WMA). The value may be a year (e.g. 2020) or a more specific date (e.g. 2020-06).

Note

ID3 TDRL is read as a deprecated alias for the release date and converted to TDRC by the legacy-fields check; see tag handling.

Warning

Some MP4 files created by other tools store the aard atom as an integer (the year only), which albums cannot read. When albums sets the release date on such a file, the existing integer atom is replaced by the text value.