There's a small problem when preserving file modification times - some backup programs will often not realize that the file has changed. Not only is the time preserved but quite often the file size as well and many backup programs don't look beyond those criteria.
It would be nice if there were an additional option to "bump" the mod time by just a second. Then the approximate time is preserved, without it being exact. It's nice being able to maintain the date/time for the many music organizers that can display new music or that allow you to browse your music by the mod date.
Any chance some thought can be given to this request?
I run into a 2nd problem by preserving the exact mod time of files...
The problem is that I keep my main music library in Flac format, but I also have a scheduled script that automatically runs each night and keeps a parallel Mp3 library by transcoding new and changed Flac files to Mp3 for use in portable players. For the script to work properly the file either needs to be new, whereby it will be created anew in the Mp3 directory tree, or else the file's mod time must change, whereby the old Mp3 file will be overwritten by a new one.
Being able to bump the file modification time when tags are updated would be a big help both for this transcoding/mirroring task and for doing backups, while still being able to maintain the chronological order of music as it was added to the library.
Maybe, you could use the Windows-archive-flag for such operations?
This flag will be set on a mp3 even tough the mp3tag-option "preserving file modification times" is checked.
You can get this attributes for every single file with the command
attrib *.mp3 in a cmd-window.
If you wanna unset this archive-flag - i.e. after your copy-task - you can set it with
attrib -a *.mp3
I have just encountered this very issue!
I have "Preserve file modification time when saving tags" checked as my software uses this to organise the library by date added. I have been using my virus lockdown spare time to correct and update a lot of tags throughout my library but I have just realised that due to tag padding the file size does not change either. Consequently my backup script (using rsync on linux) does not know these files have actually changed. I could use the --checksum option but this will take all day!
As this is an old thread, has anything since been added/changed that will allow modifying the timestamp by a second when saving tags?
Or maybe an Action that can modify the timestamp?
Is there a way to run an external program as part of an Action Group?
As soon as you switch off the option to preserve the modification date, any action will modify the time.
No external program can be called with an action but it could be called with a tool. See File>Options>Tools