[Nicolai P. Zwar]

As I said, it’s always recording date for me (consistently, regardless of pop music, classical music, film scores, etc.). I tag all my music consistently, regardless of classical music, film scores, pop music… date is recording date, composer is composer… performer is performer… and the primary intent of the tags is that the recording is clearly labeled and identifiable. I don’t need information about the composition, but the specific recording, because that is what is actually labelled. Wouldn’t make much sense to me to put in “1934” on a Robbie Williams performance of “Winter Wonderland” because the song was written then. 🙂 So BEN HUR the OST has 1959 as year, the Tadlow recording 2017.

Because my collection is consistently tagged, should I ever need to change the tagging system, it would probably be fairly easy to batch edit it in something like MP3edit.

I don’t have Apple Music either, I’m not even in the Apple Eco system, but I do use ALAC instead of FLAC, basically just for legacy reasons (I started with it). I considered once converting my collection from ALAC to FLAC, but in the end decided against it, because… there’s no reason, the formats are identical for the most part.
Now while FLAC and ALAC are practically identical in capability and you can convert from one to the other without loss of audio quality, there are some slight differences. FLAC has the native-error checking and integrity verification (that’s nice), while ALAC has the more solidified tagging structure, because the metadata architecture is formally specified, so you have fixed, clearly structured fields (“atoms”), whereas the Vorbis Comments FLAC uses are “anything goes”, which may even lead to arbitrarily named standard fields (Albumartist, Album Artist, Album_Artist, and so on), which means FLAC could at times contain inconsistent or conflicting tag names, which leads to sorting issues, split artists, mismatched albums, and unpredictable behavior across software. ALAC does not have that problem, it allows great flexibility within its atoms system, but insists on clear, formally established conventions for tag names that all devices support in the same way.

So both formats, while virtually identical in their capabilities 98% of the time, offer slight advantages and disadvantages over the other.