Sound Acquisition time zone issues

[htleblond]

My team has occasionally come across an issue where Sound Acquisition seems to automatically interpret SoundTrap audio file dates as being in local time even when UTC is selected in the options dialog, as shown in the first image where the date in the audio file name is 2022-12-01-00:00:00, but that gets converted eight hours forward as if the original was in Canada/Pacific. Apparently some of the SoundTrap data we have was accidentally processed in local time, which is probably the culprit, but I'm not sure where in the code it reads the WAV file's metadata for a time zone (I'm assuming I'm just missing something). However, if I set the time zone to Canada/Pacific, it's now at 4am instead of midnight (second image), which doesn't make any sense anyway.

Any ideas?
Holly

[BrianSMiller]

I can confirm this bug is occurring for me too when processing .sud files in Pamguard 2.02.10.

I would be strongly in favor of ensuring that Pamguard API only use UTC for reading and writing data (which is what the time-zone option indicates, even though this appears not to be the case).

[htleblond]

Also, the dates written into binary files are in local time, which caused some issues for my plugin when trying to get data line up correctly. I guess if you're on GMT time, then it makes sense that this may have been glossed over.