For me, the Date Added field in iTunes is probably the most important field, after the obvious Artist / Track / etc. I sort by this field to get a sane view of the library, the dates also often carry extra information (for ex. here is music I discovered while in Berlin, etc).
According to my research, none of the iTunes library merging tools are able to modify the Date Added field when merging because of Apple’s restrictions on this. This sucks. There is a semi-solution that places the real Date Added value into the comment field of your mp3s, allowing you to sort that way instead, but that sucks too.
One solution I’ve thought about is to modify an existing iTunes merging tool of some kind, to change the system date to the desired one upon the transfer of each song while merging, thus forcing iTunes to set the Date Added correctly. However, most of the iTunes merging software seems to be impossible to change this way and also isn’t open-source.
Have you ever done this or have you seen a fix?
