Could this be implemented in the next version?

Wow, I really can't seem to imagine why this feature might be needed or useful. I'd like to see an explanation of that, if you don't mind.

I want to know the "age" of my files.
I could look at the creation date, but for downloaded files, that would not be an option because creation date is altered as they are downloaded (or extraction from an archiv).

yep second this request. It's really annoying trying to find my new files in explorer when a few older songs ive played recently and have had play counts added appear with the other newly downloaded files.

here comes the third one.

i'd like to have this feature too

For sure, that's a feature I've been looking for - so count me in in the choir.

File dates are very quick and useful for estimating different "versions" of songs, without having to use different utilities. Josh has thought of this issue when he made FLAC.EXE, which preserves the dates between WAV->FLAC-WAV conversions. Just looking at the dates, I know which cd/dvd reader I've been using and mostly the FLAC version used.

Yes, I would appreciate this feature, too. Whenever a file is accessed for writing, an option to not update the file's timestamp would be nice.

+1!

Erm, I know people are going to hate this, but it seems you want to modify files without the computer thinking you modified it. quite normally, this requires an external application.

The only way to do this, simply, on windows, in a plugin, would be to make a plugin that recreates the 'touch' UNIX command. The plugin could store the 'current' modified time and 'touch' it back into place after the update.

The reason I say plugin is that recreating such items would not really be something worty of inclusion into the core code.

That said, I'm sure someone could make a plugin with a tied in windows compile of touch to do this

In .net, the file class has a number of methods for changeing the modified and created dates:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default....ethodsTopic.asp

Someone could use these with a plugin to reset the modified date on files, or they could look up what the native win32 calls used by .net are and do it without .net (probably the best option).

In the Windows registry, if you go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem, create a new value "NTFSDisableLastAccessUpdate" and input a value of "1" it will prevent the OS from updating the time the file was updated, but it affects all your files.

Sorry if this is a useless post, but I just wanted to point this out.

There is a difference between last access date and last modification date. I think this registry value concerns only the former.

On the reg key hack: Indeed, it only disables the access update, which, actually, is a speed tweak.

On the .NET thing, they would have to backport it, because I doubt any plugin requiring .NET wouldn't get much use.

Use foo_playcount with the FIRST_PLAYED tag enabled. Not quite the same, but pretty close, and easier to manipulate with foobar's TAGZ.

Sorry to reply to an old post, but I've been searching on this topic and have found only this thread. It looks like this feature isn't supported yet, so please add my vote as well. I would like to be able to make minor corrections to my tags and keep the original file date so I'd know when I encoded it originally. I think it's handy when you've been switching between lossy encoders over time (as between the LAME alphas to beta 1, for example). I'd know at a glance if the file needs to be reencoded from lossless. Cheers.