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Podcast Conversion and dates

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oblivion:
I am a bit of a podcast addict. Sadly, I get a bit behind and -- because I TRY to be organised -- I keep my podcasts in a single folder, so I can sort them in date order, and transfer the oldest first to my MP3 player.

Mostly, this works very well. But one of the podcasts I regularly get comes in M4A format. Although the software I use to transfer stuff to my player converts things on the fly, I prefer to do the conversion myself so I can control the output quality and filesize a bit better.

So far, I have found the easiest way to do this is to use fre:ac (the new version of BonkEnc, still free though) to do the conversion to MP3, output the files somewhere away from the originals, then use another little freebie (filedate) to re-datestamp the new files to match the originals, so they don't get sorted to the end of the list. Fiddly and time-consuming, especially if you've only just got round to it after a few weeks of letting M4As build up...

Two related requests, then. Either a program that can suck in an audio file (or a list of files) and squirt out an MP3 with the same time/datestamp as the original, optionally deleting the original... or if doing that is too complex for a "snack", a program that can display two lists of files, allow them to be lined up by hand in case filenames don't quite match, then apply the date/timestamps from the source list to the destination list.

mouser:
interesting...  in thinking about a general purpose solution, one question is, can you keep the base filenames the same?
if so then a good general purpose solution might be an app that scans a directory and sets the file date stamps for all sets of files with same basename (and different extensions) to the date of earliest datestamp in the set.

skwire:
Either a program that can suck in an audio file (or a list of files) and squirt out an MP3 with the same time/datestamp as the original-oblivion (March 21, 2011, 09:30 AM)
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fre:ac actually comes with a commandline version in its install so that, combined with a small bit of AHK script, would make this a piece of cake.  Heck, you could even use the lame.exe file directly.  Do you have AutoHotkey installed?

oblivion:
fre:ac actually comes with a commandline version in its install so that, combined with a small bit of AHK script, would make this a piece of cake.  Heck, you could even use the lame.exe file directly.  Do you have AutoHotkey installed?
-skwire (March 21, 2011, 11:17 AM)
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I've got a portable copy somewhere, but I've never tried to use it. You're a proper programmer, I just pretend to know what it's about sometimes.  :-[

(I can sometimes write very simple and mechanistic black boxes -- take some input textfile, chop it up, put it back together in a different order, exit. Anything requiring screen design or direct access to the Windows API, I'm running away so fast people are choking on the dust.)

oblivion:
Do you have AutoHotkey installed?
-skwire (March 21, 2011, 11:17 AM)
--- End quote ---

Okay, just had a bit of a look at the helpfile for it. It looks like a file loop could be used to retrieve the file list and operate on them one at a time, and if I can throw commands at fre:ac or Lame, I might even be able to puzzle something out.

What I'm less sure about is -- as I suggested previously -- putting a front end on it. To make it reliable, I'd want a front end on it that allowed the specification of the input and output sources and a path to LAME or fre:ac or whatever, and I suppose to make it bulletproof it'd probably have to be able to specify encoder options and suddenly it's looking like I really should be running away from all this ui stuff  :-[  :)

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