[romdev]

I'm meticulous about tagging and backing up MP3s for different mixes in car stereos and other devices. One problem is that I have so many MP3s and different copies I don't know which are tagged and when they were ripped. I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.

I wrote a Powershell script that sets the date a minute newer when it updates ID3 V1 tags so I can compare files and know that one came from 2005 and has had metadata updated since then. I haven't found a bulk tagger that does this.

[distances]

> so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.

It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer.

Better would of course be to have lossless files of the originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose that's a different discussion.

[Springtime]

> I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is

Mp3Tag has a timestamp preservation setting. There's also the ability to run an external script/program on all selected files (via the Tools sub-menu of the context menu) or by configuring File>Export with a script.

For those wanting to preserve original timestamps I'd suggest storing them into custom tags in the files themselves as a backup. Mp3Tag can be set up to do this automatically using an Action (its scripting syntax). That way one can always restore them back using a script.

[ender341341]

You should consider just adding a `ripped on` tag, or if you're worried about it being a bad encoding then consider re-ripping from sources into a lossless format.