Now being able to delete folders that, for one reason or another, haven’t met my expectations, I found one folder associated with an album which would not open, even though I can play it through another file management program (used only because it involves a 32-bit notebook and I don’t think there is a 32-bit version of Audirvana), and I was really puzzled about it. In the end I solved the problem by reducing the length of all six *.wav file names in the album and I will be interested in whatever comments you may wish to make about that.
Here is the file name for the first track in the album as it was downloaded (as part of a ZIP file) :-
Broekhuis, Keller, Schönwälder - Live - Not in Repelen, but at home - 01 Bas Broekhuis - Escape68 (working title).wav
To enable that to be opened, I reduced the file name as follows: -
Broekhuis, Keller, Schönwälder - Live - 01 Bas Broekhuis - Escape68.wav
Note that I had to omit the ‘working title’ and brackets because it was otherwise still too long. The track description (not shown) remains unchanged. The other five tracks are of similar length and all had to be adjusted.but their track descriptions are also unchanged.
I have to admit that the tagging program I use also has difficulties with long file names too.
Are you using Audirvana on Windows? This is (still) a limitation in Windows and is not a limitation of Audirvana. Windows still imposes a limitation of max. 256 characters on path/file names in lots of places. As you said: you have this problem in a tagging program as well.
I also had this probleme with a backup program in Windows (it was unable to backup long filenames).
The only thing you can do is make sure that the length of your full path/file names is below 256 characters, otherwise you will have problems with a lot of programs in Windows (not only Audirvana).
I know that this can be a problem especially with classical music, because those file names can be extremely long. There is (as far as I know) no limitation on the length of album titels and track titels in meta data within the files itself.
So my advice is when in Windows: Keep your file names short and keep your metadata long
This is not something you can solve in Audirvana, but a limitation in the OS. You have to solve this in Windows File Explorer (since Windows File explorer actually can handle filenames > 256 characters).
Thanks for your reply, AndyLubke. Yes, I am using the 64-bit version of Windows 10 and a limitation to file name length due to the operating system would certainly answer all my questions about the problems I’ve noticed in that regard. Your advice about maintaining the length of metadata makes sense too, of course, and that’s what I’ve been doing in my tagging program, so thank you again for your comments.
