Warning for overlength file name creation

[schmidj]

This is a wish for something (a DSP option?) to warn you when the ripper/converter is trying to create a file name that is too long. It would hopefully allow you to edit the file name before it is created. For me, it would have to work with multi-encoder.

The issue is that, I believe Linux Bash has a 255 character name limit, and Windows, or at least the routine that makes Linux files accessible in Windows has a limit of 255 characters for the fully qualified file name.

Now one might ask how one could ever hit that limit? Actually, it has happened to me several times using dbPoweramp ripper and the on-line metadata sources with classical CD's. I couldn't access the files on my QNAP NAS from my PC, and had to use the QNAP file manager accessory to shorten the names.

Like many, my directory name for the directory for a CD is the artist name concatenated with the name of the album. The files for the tracks are the track number concatenated with the artist name and the title of the track.

The people who put metadata in for classical CD's pay attention to details and tend to list every supporting artist, or at least the conductor, in the artist name in addition to the name of the orchestra. The track titles often include the composer name, the name of the composition, the secondary name of the composition, the opus number and more. It is not uncommon, I have found for all of this concatenated to exceed 255 characters, particularly for the Windows fully qualified version of the filename. Right now dbPoweramp does not warn that it is creating an unreadable filename, as I discovered.

Now, I watch for this, but if I shorten the metadata on the ripper metadata editing page to make the filename work, it is missing useful information for the ID tags, in order to make the filename legal.

Actually, Winamp is worse, it just truncates the filename, leaving off the extension, making the file unusable. At least with dbPoweramp, the extension is intact, so I was able to edit the names without reripping when I found that Windows couldn't access them.

To be usable, any routine would probably have to allow the user to configure it for the maximum length to allow, as i doubt dbPoweramp could be aware of the length of the characters added to make the filename fully qualified in Windows.

John Schmidt