Newbie Question: smart playlist by year?

[peterb]

Hi Everyone,

I’m new here and this is my first post! I’ve just started using djay pro ai and I’m trying to create a smart playlist that groups tracks by year (e.g. music from the 60s, the 70s, etc.). I checked the metadata on my songs and they all have a “year” tag. However, I can’t find the “year” metadata in the smart playlist. It has “Released”, but none my tracks have that, they only have year. Suggestions?

Thank you,
Peter.

Versions: djay Pro AI (v3.6.7) on iPadOS 14.4.2.

[Emily]

Hi @peterb,

Welcome to the Community Forums and thanks for bringing this up. You are absolutely right that the “Year” tag is not currently an option when creating a Smart Playlist in djay’s My Library collection.

I’ve passed this feedback to our Development Team to look into further and to determine if this might be a simple fix. I’ll keep you posted here when I have any updates.

The current workaround for this would be to set rules for your Smart Playlist using the metadata tags that are currently included in djay, but I realize this may not be ideal given your desired grouping of tracks by year. Again, I’ll keep you updated here.

[mabbs]

Hi,

I was struggling with this too, thought I was being stupid!

Thanks

[DJDon]

It’s not a surprise for those of us that have been pointing out that “Year” is missing in the columns and as field for smart playlists for some time now. As a workaround, I put the year (actually decade) in the Comments field of the song and then use Comments to create smart playlists. As a working DJ, the year is a very important field especially if you are in the groove and want to continue playing songs from the same era.

[peterb]

Wow, the latest version supports the “Year” tag. Thank you Algoriddim. I ask a newbie question and it is added in ~2 weeks. I’m in awe of your engineering team!

[Emily]

Hi All,

Sorry for the late update, but as @peterb already shared, the “Year” tag is now supported in djay Pro AI for iOS (version 3.7 and later) and djay Pro AI for Mac (version 3.1 and later).

Thanks for sharing your question/suggestion here and for your patience! Happy mixing.

[SteNight]

I think you need to remove the “Solved” from this topic
Yes “Year” has been added to smart playlists for IOS but as far as I can see it doesn’t work!

I have tried using this feature on both iPhone and iPad latest version 3.7.5. I have even deleted Djay and reinstalled to test this feature.

The only way to receive a result using Year is if I set YEAR=0 where it selects ALL tracks.
If I select a year (ie 2020) or range (1 to 2021) I get zero results.

Before you ask me a crazy question! Yes. 90% of my ITunes tracks contain the year and I have tested the feature further my adding new tracks with the year field populated and used the djay feature to import the latest tracks to see if the new option only applied to newly added data.

I was waiting for, and really hoping this feature would work as the “released date” is a waste of time as it can’t be updated in iTunes and requires the full date not just the year.

Please confirm that this is a bug or that I am the only user having this issue.

Thank you

Ps. Am I right in thinking that the only way to remove tracks from the “Djay” library is one by one. I have duplicates after importing all tracks only from the iTunes library and haven’t got time to look through 9,000 tracks to find them. I just want to delete the djay only imported songs and re-import.

[Emily]

Thanks for pointing this out, @SteNight. Our apologies for not catching this in our testing, but I can confirm that this feature isn’t working as expected on iOS. It is, however, working as expected on Mac.

I’ve reported this to our development team and I’ll keep you posted with any updates here!

I’ve also linked your question about removing multiple tracks from the djay library to this existing Forums Topic: Delete Multiple Songs in "My Library".

[Emily]

Hi All, I have an update from our Development Team about this question. It turns out that in order to use the “Year” metadata in djay for iOS, there are two requirements.

1. The file must have ID3 metadata with a TDRC field in the format ‘yyyy’ (ie, 2013). Here is an example of where you could find that metadata by looking at a file’s information:

2. The file must be imported from Files into the My Library source in djay, not from iTunes. The reason for this is that iTunes on iOS doesn’t support the ‘year’ attribute, so the file would be imported without this information. Thus, djay can’t read that information either. However, if your tracks are imported from the Files app source, djay is able to read the year metadata directly from the file. Please see below for how to import from Files into My Library:

Please know that our team is also looking into how we might improve upon this functionality in the future, and we’ll keep you posted with any news about that as it becomes available. If you have any other questions or feedback, I’m happy to help.

[peterb]

Thank you Emily for letting us know! You rock.