Hi all, this might be a dumb question but I am a new WaveLab user and couldn’t find any info online unless I was looking in the wrong places.
When I’m rendering files in a montage, for example, “All CD Tracks in Group” option, I am having an issue with a specific song title that has a slash in the title (the title is “Feedback 3/4” or the filenaming convention I have set up should be “06 ARTIST NAME - Feedback 3/4.wav”)
When I render the CD tracks, since the track name is used, this song creates a folder called “06 ARTIST NAME - Feedback 3” and then inside of the folder is “4.wav” and obviously this is because there is a slash character in the song title / CD track title metadata as I have the file naming conventions pulling from the track metadata.
My question is: is there a way I can get WaveLab to replace certain foreign characters such as “/” with a separate character, such as either dashes or underscores, automatically when rendering a montage? I can’t change the metadata because my client needs the song titles embedded and doing “Feedback 3-4” or “Feedback 3_4” is obviously unacceptable.
My naming scheme block is “[/] [Counter] [-] [CdTextTrackPerformer] [-] [CDTrackTitle]”
also I am using WaveLab Pro 10.0.40 (build 127). THANK YOU!
What is your OS? If you’re on Windows - a slash is simply not allowed in a file name anywhere in Windows.
Apart from that, there could also be a restriction at play concerning the ‘CD Text’ allowable characters. I know CD Text has a limited character set, but I don’t know which characters are (not) allowed…
Yeah, slashes in file names are bad news. Sometimes they’re OK but not always. It’s definitely bad practice in my book. You can still keep the slashes and special characters in the metadata and the CD-Text which has a limitation on special characters. According to Wikipedia:
The original Sony authoring tools and specifications supported ASCII and two of its supersets, ISO-8859-1 and “MS-JIS”.
Bottom line:
1) Metadata allows for lots of special characters.
2) CD-Text allows for some but not many special characters.
3) Keep any special characters or slashes out of the file names.
I can’t remember where but I think there is a setting that prevents rendered files from having illegal characters in the name, or maybe it’s automatic now. Before this setting, I once had a case where a file name had a question mark in it. I zipped the folder of files like usual and delivered it to the client as usual.
The client kept telling me that song 7 was missing and after some troubleshooting, I learned that if you zip a folder of files on a Mac, and a file has a special character such as a question mark, the file will vanish when unzipped on Windows.
Since then, I keep file names simple, and handle the special stuff in CD-Text/Metadata and life goes on.
Did you make an optional setting for removing illegal characters in rendered files, or is it just automatic now since version 9 or 9.5? I feel like something changed around then but I can’t remember if an option was added, or a permeant change was made.
If I had a question mark in the track marker name and was using track marker names for the rendered file names, it used to put that ? in the file name.
However, sometime in the last year or two this changed so that the ? is changed to a safe character, and I can’t remember if PG made this a permanent thing behind the scenes, or if there is a setting hiding somewhere. I kind of remember selecting this as a setting but can’t find it now if it is a setting.
Hi, just wanted to bump this thread as I came across the problem once again today with illegal characters. Had a song title with a “?” and a “!” in it and had to remove those characters from the CD Track Markers list in my Montage in order to get WaveLab to render them without an issue.
I SHOULD ALSO NOTE: I will get the error about illegal characters and then WaveLab will just hang up. It’ll show a spinning wheel next to the project/montage name in the Audiomontage sub window and then won’t let me quit the program because it thinks a task is still running. Only option is to control+alt+delete and force quit WaveLab in Task Manager.
My question original question was, and still is,: is there a way I can get WaveLab to replace certain foreign characters such as “/” with a separate character, such as either dashes or underscores, in filenames automatically when rendering a montage?
I just tested this again. I put a slash in the CD-Text and Marker name of a song. Then I rendered WAV files of the song. WaveLab transposed the slash to a dash in the file name, but the slash is retained in the metadata/CD-Text. I can’t recall if this is a setting in WaveLab or just automatic, but I find that can put all the special characters I need in the marker names for metadata purposes, and WaveLab will intelligently replace illegal characters in the file names when rendering.
