Olympus Digital Wave Player -- Where Is Folder A? What Time Is It?

I was using an Olympus VN-960PC digital voice recorder, and was downloading recordings from that device to Windows XP via mini-USB cable.  Unlike the Olympus VN-6200PC, the VN-960PC used the Digital Wave Player (DWP) program to download and display recordings.  DWP showed the actual time and date when the recording was made.  That information was not visible in Windows Explorer; WinEx would just show the date and time when the file was downloaded.

I was able to rename DWP's files (in the format DW_A0001.wav) so that the date and time of creation were contained in the filenames.  I did this using the Aqua Deskperience screen capture program to save the onscreen data from DWP into a text file, and then massaging the contents of that file with text commands (e.g., MID) in Microsoft Excel to produce a batch file to rename the files.  The batch file would run on the WinXP command line, and each line in the batch file would contain the command to rename one file.  The Excel formula for this conversion was something like ="ren "&char(34)&[old filename]&char(34)&" "&char(34)&[new filename]&char(34).  (The meaning of that command becomes visible when you run it.)  The resulting batch file line would say something like "ren DW_0001 2010-06-03 08.41 Recording.wav."

To make that approach work, I needed to be able to view the downloaded recordings in DWP.  The recordings were typically saved in a folder whose name matched the name of the folder I had used to save them on the VN-960PC.  Since I typically used Folder A, the usual location of the downloads, in WinXP, was \My Documents\Digital Wave Player\Message\Folder A.

But now I had a problem.  I was copying the downloaded files from a machine running WinXP SP3 to another machine running WinXP SP2 in a VMware Workstation virtual machine (VM) on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I had installed DWP in this VM, and when I ran DWP in the VM it did show the usual set of folders (Folder A, Folder B, etc.), but I could not find where on the computer those folders were actually located.

The answer was that I was looking for the wrong folder name.  It was not Folder A.  It was FolderA, without a space, and it was being created in the usual place.  That part was simple enough.  I wanted to explain my setup, though, so that I could address some questions that I have seen in other posts online, and to pass along a couple of related insights.

One such insight was that, as it turns out, it was also possible to run DWP in Ubuntu.  The basic solution was to install Ubuntu with Wine, and then just find the DWP installation file (setup.exe) and double-click on it.  (You could also use Wine to run other Windows programs.)  The DWP installation file was already on my system because I set it up as a dual-boot, but I could also have copied it over.

Someone had also created an Ubuntu command-line program to download files from the DVR.  My search led to the discovery that this program, odvr, also had a GUI in its latest version.

Incidentally, in case anyone wonders, I was not able to get the VN-960PC to work directly with Ubuntu itself, nor with WinXP in an Ubuntu VM.  In other words, I could run DWP in a VM to view the DW*.wav files that I had copied there, and I could run DWP in Ubuntu via Wine, but I could not get the hardware to work such that DWP would offer to transfer the files from the DVR to the computer.  All I could get in the WinXP VM was a "usb device not recognized" error.

The other thing I wondered was whether Ubuntu might have a way of extracting the date and time from the DW_A0001.wav file without making me jump through those hoops in Aqua Deskperience and Excel.  The creation date and time information had to be in there somewhere, but how could I get it out?

I took a look at a DW_A0001.wav file in WinXP (right-click > Properties > Summary).  It said it was a 4-bit mono file saved in IMA ADPCM format at a bit rate of 88kbps and an audio sample rate of 22 kHz.  Those values would probably have been different if I had been using the VN-960PC's SP or LP rather than HQ recording modes.  Properties did not state the correct date for file creation; as just noted, it claimed that the created, modified, and accessed dates and times were identical.  I couldn't figure out a solution, so I posted a question on it in an Ubuntu forum.  That didn't draw a quick response, so I tried again in a Windows forum.  No luck there either.  I wasn't turning up much in a search, so I had to let this slide for now.