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[Jumpsturdy]

I have just imported my audio library which is in a single firewire 800 external enclosure and all the albums in it were tagged while using it with a mac and iTunes. Each song and album had the meta-data carefully applied and artwork embedded into each song. I have spent over ten years getting it correct and have gone through each song to check that the tags were and are correct. There are 10,816 albums with 140,000+ songs. The import ran smoothly but 37 songs failed to import and were marked as "bad". Afterwords, I checked each of the 'bad' songs and they played through correctly with no glitches in iTunes as well as Logic Pro. The songs that failed to import were not entire albums of songs (i.e. all the songs from an album), but individual songs from 32 separate albums with only a 5 from the same album. None had excessively long filenames. First question is what is likely causing them to be analyzed as "bad" and how can I fix them. I don't mind putting in the effort to deal with the files individually to rectify whatever is needed to allow them to import; but I do very much want to get them in as having albums with missing tracks is unacceptable given the effort I put into constructing this library initially. At least half the music comes from vinyl I have digitized myself in my studio using very high end equipment, and while he percentage of songs that failed to import is statistically very small, each song represents a fair amount of time and effort originally in getting it ripped and tagged.
I have recognized that recent iterations of iTunes on the Mac have been loosing ground and have made the commitment to move to JRiver's Media Center for the PC in order to have the most versatile application available to manage and play my music. I am willing to switch operating systems and applications and put in the work to master the learning curve of doing so, but will only be really happy if all my music can come with me.
So any and all suggestions as to how to make this happen will be greatly appreciated.

[Jumpsturdy]

Forgot to mention that while at least a third of the music is high resolution, none of the "bad" files were. They were all 16/44. And all files on the drive were in Apples Lossless format.

[JimH]

Could you send us a file?  Thanks for your patience and for the details.  Send to logs at jriver and include a link to this thread.

[Jumpsturdy]

Will do; and thank you.

[Matt]

Thanks for the log.

One of the failing files is this one:
F:\iTunes Media\Music\Decca Boxset 53 - Pepe Romero - Academy of St Martin\Ultimate Classical Guitar Disc 3_ Guitar Concertos No.1 & No.3 (Pepe Romero-Sir Neville Marriner)\3-05 Guitar Concerto No.3 in F, Op.70 - II. Andantino Alla Siciliana con Variazioni.m4a

That's 260 characters, which is exactly at the Windows maximum of 260.  The limit is enforced at the shell level, not file system level.

If it were more than 260 characters, MC would report "Failed to import because filenames are too long" in the import summary.

I'm suspicious that there's a boundary condition at exactly 260 characters.  This is a grey area, since it's a little ambiguous is 260 characters is allowed, or only 259 to leave room for the NULL terminator.

As a test, could you try shortening the filename by a few characters?  I'm also going to test to see if I can reproduce the issue on our side.

[Matt]

There was a boundary condition in our code at 260 characters.

Next build:
Fixed: Filenames that were exactly 260 characters long would be rejected because they exceed the Windows shell limit, but would not be correctly reported as 'filename too long' on the import summary.

The correct limit is 259 characters (so that there's room for null termination in a MAX_PATH, which is 260, character buffer).

While the JRiver framework supports any filename length (necessary for Mac and Linux support), I believe it's a bad idea to let files that break the OS rules import into the library.  It will lead to tricky to fix problems like tagging failing, locating on disk failing, etc.

[Jumpsturdy]

Matt, thanks for looking at this. I will correct the tracks with filenames that are too long. What I am really anxious to find out is why the tracks marked "bad" failed to import. There were 38 of them and I have checked them quite carefully and they seem to play fine in other programs and were able to be transcoded without issue. Any suggestions there would be a lifesaver. Thanks.

[kstuart]

There is a version of JRiver MediaCenter for Mac (it has its own Forum on this site).

[Jumpsturdy]

Thanks for the suggestion; I had originally tried the Mac version as I have been a mac user since the late 80s. However, I decided to go with the PC version due to the added features and maturity of the application. As a result, I have now installed Windows for the first time about two weeks ago and am learning the platform solely to be able to use Media Center for my music. While the mac version didn't reject any file imports due to filename length as I had with the PC version, it rejected the same 38 files as being "bad" as did the PC version. Since those files play well in other applications, I am trying to figure out the nature of the problem so I can correct it.

[Jumpsturdy]

The log file shows this message "CAtom::Read Expected empty size 12, Pos 17867920, Size 28, stsc" in association with the failure to import the "bad" tracks. I don't know what this means, or more importantly how to rectify it and fix the file.

[Jumpsturdy]

One last question. When I have activated import and it completes the process, it shows in the "Details" window the files which were rejected or failed to import. This includes details on the tracks which were rejected due to filename length as well as the ones marked "bad".
However, in the log files, only the "bad" tracks are listed in detail and the ones rejected for having a filename that is took long are not listed.
So, how can I get a copy of the importing "details" window in order to get the list of the tracks with too long a filename. I have been unable to select and copy the text from the "details" window.

[Jumpsturdy]

As a follow-up, I have managed to get all tracks imported correctly. I transcoded all the files that were marked as "bad" into AIFF format and then back to Apple Lossless, after which MC recognized and imported the files with no difficulty. Reduced the few filenames that exceeded the 250 character limit and they imported as well. All meta-data intact.