mp3's from PC to mac

[PrimalFear]

Hello all,
I recently revamped an old powerbook G3 to use at work to play music on through our bars sound system, works like a charm.

After checking the sound quality I decided to transfer all my music collection to the laptop, obviously there was not going to be enough space for 5000+ tunes so I purchased a Simpletech 160 gig external HD, it to works like a charm.

Here's my problem, after spending most of the night transferring all my tunes & folders to the Ext HD I noticed most of the songs & folder names were renamed or missing the end of the name for want of a better description, for example ...
The folder "Gnarls Barkley-St Elsewhere.inc" was renamed to "GNARLS~1.INC"
or
the song title "102-beatfreakz-somebodys_watching_me" was changed to "102-BE~1.MP3"

(Please note that when I chose the Squiggle sign ~ it appears nearer the top of the text I cant find it as such on my keyboard)

I guess my question is how do I correct this problem either from happening again & if theres a way of repairing the folder & title names without re-transferring.

 

[scottlinux]

What disc format is the external drive in? HFS+? Or another format?

By what you describe happening, sounds like it is a Microsoft formatted disc. FAT32 or NTFS. (Windows file systems suck. Limited to 8 character file names, and other limitations for individual file size.) Most likely NTFS. Do you share this external drive with a Windows machine?

Unfortunately the only way to fix this is to format the drive HFS+ in OS X, then copy the files over again from the original source. Good luck.

 

[balamw]

The squiggle names are the Windows "short file names", both NTFS and FAT32 do support long(er) file names, but both fall back to 8.3 for compatibility with DOS. Could be that the version of OSX on the G3 is only capable of reding the short file names?

Anyhow, if the files are properly tagged, why not just let iTunes rename them when you import them into the iTunes library.

B