For example, my friend tells me the "In Your Eyes" on the ...Say Anything soundtrack is mixed differently than when it appeared on the album, but there is no "edit" or "mix" associated with it.

You're right, of course. When it's a different version of the song, then it makes sense to name the album where that specific version of the song originated. I'd also go the extra step of adding "(Say Anything Mix)" to the song title in that case. But I would still put the correct year that the song was originally recorded. Peter recorded that particular performance of "In Your Eyes" in 1986, but that soundtrack came out in 1989. In my book, that makes it an '86 song, not an '89 song, regardless of whether it was re-edited for the soundtrack.

(It just so happens that you used one of my favorite songs/movies/artists as an example.)

But most soundtracks and compilation albums are just collections of unaltered older material (perhaps mabye remastered, digitally restored, or re-eq'd). In those cases, I much prefer to tag my MP3's with the correct original recording date and original album. It'd just seem silly to punch in "1999" on the Empeg and have it start spouting 70's and 80's tunes from movie soundtracks.

There's some gray areas in there, though. How much does a recording need to be altered before you call it a new recording? There's a particularly bad butchering of Tom Sawyer on the Small Soldiers soundtrack. Every note of that recording was originally made in 1981, some DJ just sampled and re-spliced it into more or less a new song.

Fortunately, the ID3v2 tag can handle this. There's room for all of those parameters in its data: Original writer, original recording, remix, remaster, etc. Much better than the single "year" and "album" fields of the ID3v1 tag. (See? It all fits together! Ha!)

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144