FIle names not surviving conversion/decoding?

[macfeller]

Of the five sets of FLACs (five separate posters on USENET, pretty sure they were Windows/EAC encoded) I decoded to AIFF, only one resulting set of AIFFs had the proper names. All the other sets had names of Unknown Track.aif, etc. All the "Unkown" FLACs decoded in xACT with their names intact.

I wonder if it is a case of whether or not the FLACs were tagged by the originator to begin with. I can not test as I've deleted the files.

[sbooth]

Of the five sets of FLACs (five separate posters on USENET, pretty sure they were Windows/EAC encoded) I decoded to AIFF, only one resulting set of AIFFs had the proper names. All the other sets had names of Unknown Track.aif, etc. All the "Unkown" FLACs decoded in xACT with their names intact.

I wonder if it is a case of whether or not the FLACs were tagged by the originator to begin with. I can not test as I've deleted the files.

If the input files are not tagged, the output files will receive the "Unknown Artist" type filenames unless the "Save converted files to the same location as original" option is checked in the Output preferences. This option should likely be renamed to "Preserve filenames and locations for input files". But , believe it or not, this behavior is by design

[macfeller]

I was afraid of that. A total PITA too often for me. I'm the guy that went on and on a couple days ago about a feature request for options in output location handling.

So I guess I just have to ask: If file names can be saved when output is to the same location, why can't they be saved when going to a different location?

[mlik]

I have to agree with macfeller here - the behavior of changing file names for untagged files is really odd in an otherwise spectacular application. I submitted a feature request on the tracker for this, it seems to me that keeping filenames when there is no tag information should be the default behavior, whether you're moving to another folder or not. To rename everything with useless information is pretty unhelpful.

[sbooth]

I hear what you guys are saying- I will add something like this for the next version of Max.

But a question on specifics- let's say you have untagged files, with the output set to go to a custom directory setup like "{albumArtist}/{albumTitle}/{trackNumber} - {trackTitle}". Where do the files go? In the root of the output directory?

[mlik]

For the conversions I'm doing, I don't specify a file naming format, because I am starting with WAV files, so I know they won't have any tag info. So, I could imagine that I set up an output folder, leave "specify file names for output" unchecked, and the files would end up in the other folder converted, with the same name but different extension.

But yeah, if I had a whole folder of files, some with tags and some without, I suppose that the tagged ones get named and the untagged ones just end up in the root of the output folder.

Thanks so much for thinking about this. If the change makes it in, it will solve a lot of problems for me. The company I work for is a small non-profit that works with a lot of audio data. If we can use the program for our work, we will be glad to make a donation to your development.

Best,
Dalton

[macfeller]

Directory root is where I have them go, no matter which directory I choose as output (and I'm the one seemingly constantly changing directory depending on which drives I am dealing with).

[sbooth]

I've committed a change that fixes this issue. Thanks for pointing it out!

[Fuga]

And thank *you* for staying on top of all this stuff even when you seem to be very busy these days.