How to get around long file location names being an issue?

Discussion in 'PC' started by Bunford, Oct 5, 2023.

  1. Bunford

    Bunford Audiosexual

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    I love the PML (Production Music Live) stuff and think they're definitely a market leader in what they do, be it courses, presets, and sample packs. However, one things they seem to do is have folder within folder within folders that result in a huge string of characters for file names. This normally goes beyond the 260 character limit for Windows, and so I often get an error about transferring PML stuff to my storage drive(s), being the one below:

    upload_2023-10-5_15-8-13.png

    Is there any way to work around this without having to spend an age manually renaming a bunch of things to try and pot luck it down to sub-260 characters?

    I've tried:
    • enabling Long Paths in registry; and
    • using xcopy command as Admin (which fails due to there being spaces in many of the file names etc, so necessitates manual intervention again).


     
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  3. RachProko

    RachProko Platinum Record

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    Make sure the destination path is a short as possible. So make a directory like C:\a and copy all files there. From there you can 'move' the content to other locations on that drive.
     
  4. DoubleTake

    DoubleTake Audiosexual

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    I went through with Bulk Rename Utility and renamed all folders and files to "PML" instead of Production Music Live
     
  5. Bunford

    Bunford Audiosexual

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    Already the case. It's S:\Samples, so can't be much shorter without being the root.
     
  6. Bunford

    Bunford Audiosexual

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    Done this too and always call them PML to try and shorten, but it still seems to happen.
     
  7. xorome

    xorome Audiosexual

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    Best Answer
    One of the recent Windows 11 bi-yearly updates supposedly added long path name support to Explorer/Files. Alternatively try a file manager that natively supports long path names (Total Commander for example).

    EDIT: 7-Zip File Manager may work too.
     
    Last edited: Oct 5, 2023
  8. RachProko

    RachProko Platinum Record

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    S:\Samples is already 6 characters more than S:\s ? Maybe just what you need to be within 256 characters?
     
  9. Bunford

    Bunford Audiosexual

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    I get that, but PML need to be realistic here too. Some users will only have the OS' C:\ drive and it's obviously not realistic to expect people to store all this stuff on their C:\ root drive. There has to be enough space to accommodate so kind of organisation rather than using up the entire 260+ characters for their own file structures without giving users an option to even organise the stuff anywhere except for the root of a drive.
     
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  10. Bunford

    Bunford Audiosexual

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    This worked. Cheers for the prompt. :wink: I forget about the File Manager aspect and only use 7z as an archive/zip tool!
     
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