Audio file player with wall-clock time display

Question

I record about 1hrs worth of sound on an Olympus voice recorder at certain times of the day—say 4:30pm to 5:30 pm—with sounds happening at various times (that I write down). When playing back I want to see the timeline in wall-clock time so, for example, I can listen to what happened at 5:10pm.

I've tried Windows media player, VLC, the Olympus sonority that came with the recorder, Freetrim mp3 etc but they all show the timeline in minutes/seconds starting from zero as the start with apparently no way to add an offset.

So I'm looking for a different audio player or a plugin to one of those listed above (or for a different audio player for that matter), my requirements are:

• Display a timeline based on the real start time/date.
• Free.
• OS: Windows
• Ideally also: display the waveform as well so that I can more easily identify when the sounds start.

My recorder saves in WMA but I can easily change the file to MP3 or MP4 using VLC if necessary.

Answer 1

Okay … so you made me write a plugin.

I call it the Time Keeper.

Lua script: Download from Google Drive

Repository: https://github.com/aswinpj/Time-Keeper

Installation

Download the plugin and put in in:

<VLC_INSTALLATION_DIRECTORY>VLC\lua\extensions

How does it work?

So on opening the plugin, this is what you see:

Enter the start time on the top text box in HH:MM format and the end time on the second text box also in HH:MM format. Click on the Time Travel button and the player will seek to the position.

Caution

The plugin does what it is meant to do. I have not incorporated proper input validation, checking etc.

If you type an ending time that is less than the starting time, the plugin won't respond. (Actually it throws an error in the background. But since the guys at VLC were intelligent enough to not make the player crash on a plugin error, I am advertising this as a feature ;) ).

Another feature is that the plugin won't respond if you enter the times in any format other that HH:MM. Please note that you must be playing the audio in the backgroud before using the plugin.

Please try it out and tell me if this is what you had in mind. I will try to improve the plugin with your suggestions.