Loss of file creation date

WaveLab
1

Hi there,
i stumbled across a huge problem for me while editing audio for video:

I rely heavily on timecode. Timecode gets stored as a mixture of metadata (seconds from 0:00 o’clock I guess, frame rate and more) and the file creation date. BUT after every edit and save of any kind the creation date of the file gets set to the actual time and therefore I can no longer sync with timecode.

Edit:
Ok, this was a bit unclear. Timecode is still valid as long as “OriginalCreationDate” is set correctly within BWF Metadata. Problem is within my operating systems filesystem. If “filecreationdate” is changed after every edit, the order in which they appear in Finder (Mac) changes. This makes it extremely hard to locate files if you search by date (what I very often have to do).

Example:
You have a long recording day with several wireless mics all going to one soundbag AND recording locally for backup. Later on you find out, there were some glitches during transmission to the bag. No you have to sync the backup-files to your stems. These files are very basic and often have only timcode stamps (standard) and use the file creation day to seperate recording days.

After two or more days you easily get folders with hundreds of files to test, sort and align. That’s why filecreationdate is so important to find the file you have to edit and align.

Long story short: would it be possible to keep the creation time and date while writing the changes to the file? Right now it appears as if the file gets written completely anew after every edit and safe.

Kind regards,
Stephan

2

Do you mean, the data/time reported by the operating system, or the “origination date/time” displayed in the BWF editor of WaveLab?

3

I’m not sure, but guess both. It happened to me, that if I did not explicitly set or re-set the “origination date/time” after editing the metadata and did any changes and saves, it fell back to the data/time reported by the operating system. But I’m not 100% about that. My main concern is the date/time reported by the operating system (100%).

Think of this:
10 folders, each 20 to 50 files with more or less the samen naming pattern ordered by date and time. Now you do several changes and these files get all to the top or bottom, because the date ist changed. Even if I set a color tag beforehand, after saving the file, the tag is gone.

4

Which procedure do you use to edit the audio file? Just the standard “Save” function, or the batch processor or render functions?

5

I use the standard save function.

6

In that case, that makes sense to preserve the creation date. I check soon what I can do.

1 Like
7

Thank you very much!

8

I confirm the creation date will be preserved when overwriting uncompressed audio files, with WaveLab 11.1