I received a copy of Michael Crichton's audio book "Next" from my daughter for Christmas. On the cover it says mp3-cd edition. On the back of the case it says " This program requires an MP3-CD player". I always thought that a computer was an MP3 player. When I tried to place these on my computer I noticed that some of the files were missing. After I looked at the files I noticed that some of the filenames begin with an ". Apparently this was done to keep the end user from transfering these files to a computer. While the discs work fine in a stand alone MP3 player the Windows PC sees these files as corrupt. Is there anyway to read these files from the cd to the PC? It is a major hassle to have to use a stand alone MP3 player. I really want to put this on an ipod.

Thanks
Charles

Find a non Windows PC to copy the files off the CD and rename them. Any Linux/Mac machine should work, as both allow " as part of the filename.

On a Win32 PC you could try using copy/n from a command prompt to copy the tracks using 8.3 filenames.

Try a copy command replacing " with ?. As in copy d:\?file1.mp3 c:\file1.mp3.

Dos should assume any character in place of the ?. Just make sure the output file is a valid name.

Thanks for the suggestions, it turns out that using Linux worked like a champ. I have a Tivo Boot disk that I used. I simply had to mount the hardrive and the cd-rom and then copy / rename the offending files.

Both using wildcards and the copy/n returned an "unable to find file" error.

Again, thanks for your help. I am now happily listening to the audiobook on my ipod.

Charles

Thief! The terrorists will overrun us for sure!

Bought and paid for!

Interesting... I would have bet otherwise. I just couldn't recreate the " to test. I usually use alt-numpad key combinations for odd characters, but " doesn't have one.

I would guess that the discs were made on a none dos system. You could try making a cd with a Mac or through linux and then see what you could do with the files on a win32 box.

The Windows filesystems (FAT and NTFS) don't allow quotation marks in filenames. At all. You can't do it. You also can't have colons, backslashes, and a number of other characters (full list: " * / : < > ? \ |). CD-ROMs use a different filesystem, ISO-9660, which does allow quotation marks, as well as all of those other characters. (Yes, there are other CD-ROM filesystems, including the Windows-specific Joliet, but most of them are extensions to ISO-9660. The only ones that aren't are unreadable by Windows anyway. Okay, you can put UDF, the DVD filesystem, on a CD-ROM. It probably also doesn't have those character restrictions, but it wouldn't be readable in a hardware MP3 player anyway.)

Good to know. I knew special characters aren't allowed, but I used to use spaces in my filenames in the DOS days all the time. Confused the hell out of people. I just saved the file as Alt-255hello.txt. Better yet, make a directory with a space or two after it, as it's invisible. So stuffAlt-255 looks like stuff and typing cd stuff doesn't work.

Ahhhhh. OK.