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Punctuation in Artist, Album and Song Titles

I'm getting strange behaviour with artists, albums and song titles that contain punctuation, especially the double quote.

I've been experimenting with Select All, Export as a .txt file (I'm manipulating the file in excel, exporting as text and importing to another machine - as a form of library management, it just about works). But doing this seems to cause the library to lose track of the above files. If I fix the problem and carry out normal activities, there is not a problem.

I have iTunes set to organise my music.

I don't really understand why this is happening. I suppose that I could edit the artist/album/song names to ensure the problem doesn't happen this way, but it seems unsatisfactory that I can not represent the true names of these things.

Windows Vista

Posted on Mar 24, 2008 7:33 AM

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2 replies

Mar 24, 2008 7:37 AM in response to Warhelmet

there could be some problem i think i might have a idea as why you have puncuation marks and stuff on ur songs and etc.
1. is your music in a differnt language?
2. are you downloading music from like limewire or some other illeagl downloading program?
3. if your using a CD to import the songs make sure there not scrached

and thats all i have to say about it...i have no other idea but if i do ill see to it that you get the answer

Mar 24, 2008 8:58 AM in response to l3lueyed

No, the artists/albums/songs are supposed to have punctuation marks in. But these punctuation marks are forbidden in windoze. The actual file and directory names substitute underscore characters for certain punctuation marks.

I think that selecting all and exporting as text is causing iTunes to go through some sort of process that causes it to lose file locations from the library. I suspect that it is particular combinations of characters that cause problems. It could be unpaired double quotes. Slashes that do not have surrounding spaces, etc... If I knew the exact criteria, I could avoid them

Punctuation in Artist, Album and Song Titles

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