Option to preserve file timestamps

[adamhotep]

It would be nice if there were an option to preserve the original timestamp of modified files.

[chaudum]

Hi @adamhotep

Thanks for your request. Could you elaborate a bit more on your use-case? Since rgain is actually modifying the files (setting the ID3 tags with replay gain information), the behaviour is expected.

Under the hood, rgain is using the mutagen library to read/write the ID3 tags, and I could not find an option to preserve the original modification date.

There are some workarounds to "preserve" the original modification date when editing files on Linux, which I would look at (storing the original modification date and applying it thereafter with touch).

[adamhotep]

Yeah, touch or some pythonic approximation.

Here's a proof of concept shell script wrapper that implements my request. It'd be preferable to implement all of that in python, which would remove the need for a temp file and the need to differentiate between GNU and BSD (and posix shell string manipulation is particularly illegible to most coders).

[rsplaul]

A use-case would be an mp3 collection management software (like the old squeezeboxserver/logitechmediaserver) that relies on modification dates to show newly added titles/albums in a separate section. Since mp3s don’t have any sort of unique identifier this is the only reasonable way to differentiate between metadata maintanance (like adding replay gain data) and new additions. Also, even without any library software, a user might want to keep track of when an mp3 was initially added to the collection, rather than seeing the last change.

I’d suggest introducing a -P option, similar to the option in e.g. exiftool, which does the same for JPEG files.