I had a very specific problem. The problem began when I found a solution to another problem.
I like to listen to audiobooks on my phone. Unfortunately, the BlackBerry OS 6 media player has no bookmarks and doesn’t remember where you left off playing a media file. Fortunately, the built-in Podcast app is great at doing that. I had read a tip that suggested copying audiobooks into the Podcast folder and playing them back from there with the free BlackBerry Podcast app. That was mostly just what I needed. It doesn’t bookmark the file, but if you pause playback (rather than stopping it) it will resume from that same spot when you come back to it even if you’ve closed the app in the meantime.
However, there is a complication. The Podcast app doesn’t sort files based on file name or metadata. It only sorts oldest to newest or vice versa based on the Date Modified. This makes a lot of sense if you are using the Podcast app to play podcasts. It can cause serious problems if you are using it to play back other mp3 files.
If I download an audiobook from my local library in mp3 format or rip an audiobook CD with something like iTunes there is normally no problem. The Date Modified is in sequential order matching the track order. However sometimes audiobook files get their Date Modified out of order with their file names. That creates a jumble in the Podcast app where you have to manually select the next file in the audiobook or it plays it out of order (great for generating spoilers).
Copying the files doesn’t change the Date Modified and using a media converter to regenerate them seemed like an ugly and inefficient kludge.
I tried Attribute Changer 7 by Romain Petges. It didn’t have anything for generating a sequence of Dates Modified but at least I could change all the files to the same time and date. That should work, right? Maybe then the player would break the tie by filename. Apparently it doesn’t work that way. While most of the files are in the right order there still are some jumbled up. If there aren’t too many files, I can manually change the date to work, but for a 13 CD audiobook… no way!
I tried searching the web for a program that would just increment the Date Modified so that they would sort in the right order, but I found nothing helpful. I had a hard time thinking of search terms that would find the feature I’m looking for. It is not a very common problem.
I gave up for awhile until the need cropped up again today. With a fair amount of exasperation and not a great deal of hope I Googled “bulk change mp3 date modified”. While nothing in the search summary seemed to speak to my specific need, the second hit was BulkFileChanger from nirsoft.net. Now I love Nir Sofer’s freeware utilities (if you haven’t browsed through them yet I strongly urge you to do so), so I decided to check it out.
Sure enough, from the Versions History:
Version 1.15:
Added 'Date/time sequence mode' option. When it's turned on, BulkFileChanger will set a different date/time value for every file, and the 'Add' field will be used to add additional time interval for every file.
I loaded the list of files and clicked on the Change Time / Attributes button, selected ‘Date/time sequence mode’ and in the Modified row checked the current time and date columns and selected the Add check box so it would increment each file’s Date Modified by 1 minute (or 1 second or whatever). Then I pressed the Do It button and sure enough I could sort the files by Date Modified and the order was the same as by file name. I copied the audiobook into my phone’s Podcast folder and let it index the new files and voila…. a perfect sort order.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you NirSoft.
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