mp3 transfer problemo

March 31, 2006 2:15 AM

I've transfered some mp3s from one hard drive (windows) to another (Linspire), and dang it, the titles are all messed up ("09thel~1", "lostbo~3", etc). Can I redo the transfer or do I have to fix all brazillion titles manually (unpossible)? Thanks.
posted by NorthernSky to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I don't know about retransferring, but the lovely people at musicbrainz.org have released a Linux version of their automatic tagging software that might do the trick for you.
take a look here
posted by heeeraldo at 3:20 AM on March 31, 2006

what operating system are you using to do the transfer? Can it read the long file names of the windows drive properly? Can it read the destination drive properly?
posted by antifuse at 3:20 AM on March 31, 2006

What antifuse said. What did you use to do the copying? Was it over a network?
posted by cillit bang at 4:02 AM on March 31, 2006

Also, which version of Windows? Was it a really old version like Windows 95/98/Me?
posted by intermod at 4:26 AM on March 31, 2006

If your music files are well-tagged, then you can use a program to rename the files based on those. I don't know the name of a program to do that in Linux, but I'm sure someone will chime in.

That might be easier then figuring out what went wrong and retransferring them.
posted by voidcontext at 5:31 AM on March 31, 2006

Somewhere within Linspire, something forgot the "-t vfat" command line option when mounting the Windows partition. That enables long file names instead of the MSDOS-style names. The vfat option is supposed to be autodetected, but sometimes it isn't.
posted by gmarceau at 5:53 AM on March 31, 2006

Another option is to zip (or tar) up the file and unzip it on the target platform. Doing this preserves the filenames...
posted by Arthur Dent at 10:34 AM on March 31, 2006

Easytag is a good Linux program that will rename based on tags.
posted by hilker at 12:56 PM on March 31, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, your ideas helped me figure out what kind of program to look for. I downloaded a program off CNR (a Linux-program warehouse) called Audio Tag Tool that helped rename some of the files, though not all.

Another problem I have when d-loading programs mentioned above, is that once they have d-loaded, how on earth do I install them? This Linux world is new to me and I'm used to Windows installers. Thanks again.
posted by NorthernSky at 9:24 PM on April 1, 2006