No audio on mov files

At some point through various Mac OS releases, my MOV files lost their audio. I'm not sure what point this occurred.

While there are many possible explanations here, the most probably would likely be the release of Mavericks which provided separate embedded support structures for QT 7 and QT X based applications along with the associated loss of "open" support for many legacy and/or proprietary audio and video codecs.

I did a quick test by converting them to mpeg4 using ffmpeg on my linux machine and then they play fine on my Mac after being converted to mpeg4.

Almost any application based on the FFmpeg open source codec package (e.g., VLC, HandBrake, MPlayer, etc.) can be used to play and/or transcode codecs no longer directly supported by QT X Playback structure. Even the QT X Convert structure supports many legacy and/or proprietary compression formats for conversion if the appropriate codecs or codec packages are installed on your system. Unfortunately, there are exceptions so it is usually safer to go with one of the third-party alternatives here as you did.

So I'll just be writing a perl script to glob them all, then transcode the with ffmpeg to convert to mpeg4, and then pull them onto my Mac(s).

This is, of course, is up to you. I normally prefer to use HandBrake here for its built-in batch capabilities and fuller list of conversion options/features.

At some point through various Mac OS releases, my MOV files lost their audio. I'm not sure what point this occurred. Fortunately, I backed them up to my linux server and they play fine in vlc. I knew it would be prudent to do so since it'd be awful to lose the videos of my kids when they were little.

I did a quick test by converting them to mpeg4 using ffmpeg on my linux machine and then they play fine on my Mac after being converted to mpeg4. So I'll just be writing a perl script to glob them all, then transcode the with ffmpeg to convert to mpeg4, and then pull them onto my Mac(s).

It is unfortunate that I need to do this.

Clips where the audio doesn't play, show: Linear PCM, 16 bit little-endian signed integer, 32000 Hz, 4.0 (_ _ _ _)

This indicates the file was encoded with 4 channels of audio but none of them have been actively assigned to an output channel. If you have QT 7 Pro, open the file in the "Properties" window, select the audio track, select the "Audio Settings" tab in the lower half of the window, and set the proper output channel assignments.