sox

[Mark]

I need to convert some PCM wav files to wav49, but preserve the original time and date stamps.  Any ideas?

[Jeff Zylstra]

I'll show my ignorance, once again, and ask the obvious.  Why can't you just convert the file, save it, and then use a time and date stamp utility?  Or are you speaking of a time/date stamp that is encoded into the WAV file, and not part of the file system?   If it is encoded into the WAV file, could you alter the time/date on the computer running the conversion and have the file creation date be the time stamp?  Silly I know, but the sublimely simple and obvious is where I live.   

[Mark]

Mostly because it's a subset of over 78,000 files and I need to do it all in one sweep.  there is no way I'd be able to do it manually, and no way I could track/correlate date & time stamps for that many files.  This is a Linux box and the files are recorded phone calls.

[Jeff Zylstra]

The only thing I could think of would be some kind of script that would convert them, match the new and old file names, and then use the old time stamp to change the new file name.  And messing with any file time stamp is going to void your warranty as far as using this in court for an E&O case.  I think you should talk to the legal dept at your agency before messing with these time stamps.

[Mark]

Yeah.  We don't have a legal department, and I'm looking to do this in one fell sweep without preserving original file at all.  Running out of space due to previous configuration (who knew the global setting for call recording wasn't actually global?).  Was hoping for something like

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sox --preserve *.wav *.WAV But it's not an option.  May just have to bite it and add more drives, but this system was spec'd for 5 years worth of calls and it's at 60% less than 2 years in because of this.