Error

**schmidj** · May 06, 2015, 04:30 PM

Re: Error

It looks suspiciously from the example given that the filename is too long for the operating system on your storage device (Z). Z is presumably some sort of NAS (based on the filename, it looks suspiciously like a QNAP), and well may be running Linux. There is, I believe. a 255 character limit inherent in most versions of Linux, and some software, such as the routine which makes Linux file directories readable by Windows machines, may limit the length even more. I didn't count the characters above, but it would appear there may be more than 255.

I had this issue with classical music, the tag information in the databases often goes into (too much) detail. You may have to modify your file naming (not tagging) scheme to limit the length of the file names.

To make sure you are clear, the tags, which are stored as data inside the file, are what most players use to sort and display information such as the titles, artist names, etc. They should be as complete as you need to be able to properly sort and display your collection on all your players. The filenames are used by the operating system(s) to keep track of the files on your storage devices. They don't really have to be the same, or even similar. You could have a file named "Track 25329" or "Abremjks" with a title tag of "Sympathy for the Devil" and artist "Rolling Stones" and your player will find it and display (and sort) the artist as "Rolling Stones" and title as "Sympathy for the Devil".

From a practical standpoint, you may well want the filenames and directory organization to be based on the album or artist names. You may need to manually look for a file in, for instance, windows explorer, to remove or replace it. If the filename is "Abremjks" it might be a pain to locate it. But you can easily use a truncated portion of long artist or title as a humanly recognizable file or directory name. Just be careful that it isn't so truncated that you don't end up with the same directory/file name for more than one track, or your track may get overwritten and disappear when you rip the second CD.

In the setup for the dBPoweramp ripper and converter, there are settings for the "Path" and "Naming" or sometimes "output location" which determine what file and directory names will be generated. The script used to determine the names is extremely flexible but rather obtuse. As someone on this forum (Gary?) pointed out to me when I had filename length issues, there is a "MAXLENGTH" function, which I now include in my naming string to avoid the filename length issues. For detailed information click on the red question mark at the top of the dBPoweramp screen, scroll down to "path and naming" and click on "naming conventions". Expect to be totally confused at first, particularly if you have not written code, but if you have patience and do some trial and error, you should be able to get it to work the way you want. (I tried ripping a CD where I put various test entries in the metadata entry and looked at the file and directory names generated until I got it to do what I wanted.)

If you are not used to writing computer code, you may find the location naming setup rather confusing and intimidating. Like most code, it has to be formatted exactly correctly to work. I've been writing software for many years and it took me a number of tries over some hours and with some hair pulling before I got my version to work the way I wanted. There are, however, several of us on this board who can help you out as you work on this.

**BrodyBoy** · May 06, 2015, 07:04 PM

Re: Error

Yeah, I think it's just that the filenames are probably too long. You can alter your naming string to make them shorter. Or you can impose a length limit in dBp (there are a couple parameters, SETLEN and MAXLENGTH, just for this purpose). Fortunately, a fairly easy issue to solve.

**schmidj** · May 06, 2015, 09:01 PM

Re: Error

I think MAXLENGTH is better for this, SETLEN apparently makes all the strings (and therefore file/directory names or parts thereof) the same length. it truncates long ones and pads short ones. MAXLENGTH shortens too long strings.

My naming string is currently: [IFVALUE]album artist,[MAXLENGTH]25,[album artist][],[IFCOMP]Various Artists[][IF!COMP][MAXLENGTH]25,[artist][][][] - [album]\[track] - [MAXLENGTH]25,[artist][] - [MAXLENGTH]40,[title][]

I limited the lengths of everything except the album name, as I didn't want (disc 1) etc. truncated off the name of multidisc albums. I manually put in the disc number instead of having the naming string do it from the disc x of y tag because I don't want to tell you how many times I have forgotten to correctly set that on one or more discs of multidisc sets, and it is usually wrong in the metadata online sources (partly because the same CD is often issued as both a single and later as one CD of a multidisc set.)

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