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[park]

I am trying to import a folder of m4a files into MC. In drives and devices MC doesnt even show any files in a directory full of this kind of file.

An import doesnt work either. I get "Failed to add/analyze file" messages after each of the 200 m4a files its trying to import. They play in Itunes ok.

Also, right click importing from explorer seems to have stopped working.

[JimH]

Are the files or the directory hidden?

[SteveG]

Can you play the files in Quicktime?

[park]

the files arent hidden. and they dont play in the quicktime player. it says the filename is bad. but it does play fine in itunes. ?

[park]

OK, so its a filename problem, I think. the name of the tracks was something like:

Blues - Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues - Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues (Disc 1)_1.m4a

So I renamed one so that it was shorter and it plays and imports into MC. But how do I do this with the other 198 files? Mc wont even see them to do a multiple file rename. I dont want to have to do this manually.

[GHammer]

Is it a path & name length problem?

Try moving the directory to a shorter path and see if they import.
Like if it is "D:\Documents and settings/my music/really long directory/another"
Move them to "D:\Music\Dir"

Confused? Me too!

[park]

copied the same file (in its original long filename version) to the root of the drive, not even in any folders. tried to import to no avail. guess its a filename problem.

I wish i could fix this inside mc. i dont want to do this manually in explorer.

[Alex B]

I think QT has 63 or 64 characters filename length limit.

MC cannot access the files because it tries to do that through QT engine.

Blues - Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues - Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues (Disc 1)_1.m4a

This is about 90 characters.

You can handle the filenames with MC if you first change the filename extensions to pdf (temporally). MC doesn't try to analyse pdf files. You will not be able to import the file tags, but you could use MC tools for making new filenames from the paths and the current filenames. You can change the extensions in Command Prompt with this command:
ren *.m4a *.pdf

A tool named Tag&Rename might be able to mass rename the files using the actual tag information. It has a trial period.

[Alex B]

I tried that with Tag&Rename. It works fine.

[park]

Thanks for the advice.

I would hope that this is dealt with at some point by MC though. The user shouldnt have to deal with the problem (since it was itunes that named the files this way).

In theory, all of this should be sorted by the auto import process somehow.

[pthay]

I apparently have the same problem.  What solution did you use to get around this problem?  I appreciate any advice you may have.

Thanks,

Peter

[park]

if i remember correctly I shortened the name of all of my files, and played one of them in itunes before trying to import them into MC, and that worked for me.

Hope it helps you out.

Bri

[pthay]

Bri,

That did it!  I used a 3rd party program to batch rename the filenames and then I was able to import into MC. 

I'm surprised that MC doesn't permit import of ITunes filenames considering its prevalence.

Thanks,

Peter