#113 Handle some iTunes specific ID3 tags

iTunes has some very specific ID3 tags that do all sorts of things. Some of these tags are implemented in ml_ipod like the ITUNESCOMPILATION but others are missing. For now, I will just talk about the ones more important to me at the moment by order of importance. Maybe there are important to some other people too...

1) Sort tags. iTunes itself has some sort fields where you can input some text values so you can sort artist/albums/tracks the way you want. You can easily do this inside iTunes. But as most people here, we are using ml_ipod to use iTunes less as possible. These sort fields are saved in the ID3 tags of MP3 files and MP3Tag (the latest development version) handles these tags and saves them in the MP3 files in a way that iTunes understands them.

The thing is, these tags don't do nothing by themselves.

Let's say you have some MP3 files with those sort tags filled. If you upload these files to the iPod using iTunes, they will work, but not with ml_ipod. This happens because ml_ipod does not know about these tags and don't care about them but they are there. iTunes reads theses tags and then writes them to the iTunesDB and that's what ml_ipod is missing.

The tags are:
ALBUMSORTORDER
ALBUMARTISTSORTORDER
COMPOSERSORTORDER
PERFORMERSORTORDER
TITLESORTORDER

2) The YEAR tag for TV Shows is also used to represent the "Release Date". I mean, have you ever uploaded a video file to the TV Shows category and have you noticed the little gray text "Release Date Unknown"? If you set the the YEAR tag in the format YYYY-MM-DD (I just tested it like this) and upload the MP4 video file using iTunes as a TV Show, that date will be visible instead of "Release Date Unknown".

The problem here is like #1, the YEAR tag is ignored for the release date. iTunes reads that tag and writes it to iTunesDB file and ml_ipod does not do that.

[Achim Bursian]

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Understandable, but there is one basic catch:
ml_iPod is a Winamp plugin, and it tries to use Winamp's API to get information about the files. That is to make use of future Winamp enhancements, and to be compatible to other plugins.
Reading all that stuff directly from the tracks violates the Winamp plugin rules.