Personal Anecdote: impossibly old epoch

When I rip CDs to my computer, I like to do some unorthidox things with the file metadata for the sake of organising. For one, I make all the wav files read-only, so that I don't accidentally destroy anything important. And, for every album, I set the "modification time" of the wav files and their containing folder to the date the record released.

Normally, the modification time is used by the operating system to inform programs of the last time a file was written to. So, what I do with it here is a bit hacky. But doing this, I can sort an artist's catalogue chronologically in my file manager, which I find fun.

This poses an issue, however, in the case of Masterpieces by Ellington. Computers store dates and time in a format known as UNIX epoch. A time signature is just a single integer, counting the number of seconds since midnight of January 1, 1970. Masterpieces by Ellington causes problems for me, as it released in 1951.

I use Linux, which allows negative time signatures for dates before 1970. However, the tar archive format does not support negative time signatures, which I learned in my last attempt to backup my music archive. This emitted a warning from tar which I had never seen before: impossibly old epoch.

So, my rip of Masterpieces by Ellington can't be archived without changing it's modification time. Realistically, this is entirely on me, because I'm using the modification time in a very janky way that was never intended. But I find it funny nonetheless.