Why does iTunes truncate the name of my MP3s ?

Question

Why does iTunes truncate the name of my MP3s ?

I have tons of carefully organised MP3s on my hard drive,
ripped from my CDs before i bought an iPod.

When i import a file whose name is for instance "V. Judex- Adagio molto e religioso(5).mp3", iTunes 5.0 (on Windows XP) truncates the name to 30 characters: "V. Judex: Adagio molto e relig", which is more than annoying: it's unbearable. I have so many files with more than 30 characters: i just won't rename them one by one after importing them in iTunes. I would rather sell the iPod and use a Korean-brand-less player that at least respects file names.

Any ideas ? i searched the help and the preferences but got no clues.

thanks

Posted on Sep 15, 2005 2:36 PM

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Answer 1

MacMuse

Level 7

20,796 points

Sep 15, 2005 7:01 PM in response to Patrick Loiseleur

It's a safety feature to avoid system problems. Windows has a hard limit of around 250 characters for combined path & file name lengths. Since the music directory starts in "C:\Documents & Settings\ username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\ artist..., well, you get the idea.

I encourage you to rely on the ID3 tags for storing all this important data about your files. iTunes lives on ID3 tags, and reallly doesn't care about file names. Well completed ID3 tags makes your music files fully transportable between operating systems and file systems. Music has too much "meta-data" used to describe the song (artist, album, genre, composer, etc.) to rely on file naming conventions. Focus on the ID3 tags, and let iTunes worry about matching up with the underlying file.

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Answer 2

Sep 16, 2005 3:44 PM in response to MacMuse

Well, i thought the limit was much more than 250 characters in Windows XP... anyway, even with relevant info in ID3 tags, i still see "Partita Violon no 3 - III. Ga" instead of "Partita Violon no 3 - III. Gavotte en Rondeau" in my iPod, which is not nice.

Thank you for this quick and useful answer: what i can conclude is that i'll move all my music to C:\Music or C:\iTunes and everything will be fine.

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Answer 3

Otto42

Level 6

9,070 points

Sep 17, 2005 2:54 AM in response to Patrick Loiseleur

Well, i thought the limit was much more than 250 characters in Windows XP

It's a bit complicated, but the hard limit is 255 for lots of bits of Windows. Other bits of Windows have no such limitation.

anyway, even with relevant info in ID3 tags, i still see "Partita Violon no 3 - III. Ga" instead of "Partita Violon no 3 - III. Gavotte en Rondeau" in my iPod, which is not nice.

If you are using ID3v1 tags, those have hard limits of 30 characters for things like song names and such. Use some tagging program to convert your tags to ID3v2.3 instead.

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