PCPete

Sorry to ask this here, but I've just spent 22 minutes chasing my tail around the faqs and support options. I've purchased Prism, Express Rip, and Express Dictate some months ago. However, although I made backup copies of all my registration details for each product, a recent catastrophic multi-drive RAID failure has resulted in the loss of everything, including all my registration keys, login details, and more. Since the only way to ask a support question is to either purchase support (which I don't think I should need to do), or to provide the serial number of the registered product (see previous paragraph) from the email, I don't have any other options. Feel free to PM me and we can arrange to discuss the transfer of the licences outside this forum. Please note, I paid with Paypal, so I still have Paypal registration and purchase histories for all these products, but that's the only data I do have. Thanks. Regards, Peter

I've now tried doing the same thing but from the other end, and it seems to be working OK. What I was doing was on my X64 box, I ran Switch and selected the locally available (i.e. non-networked) music source files, and transcoded them to the remote system's filesystem via it's shared folder. I'm not sure what bits were not working correctly, but I just couldn't get more than a couple of hundred files converted without errors. What I've done now, is on the remote x32 box, I'm using Switch to grab the same source files off the server's share, and convert them to the same folder that the other system was converting to but now locally, and it seems to be working just fine. I'm now into file# 3,600 or so, and there have been no errors or overwrite problems so far. It IS interesting to see the amazing file-reading, list-managing, and coding performance difference between the quad-core 2.6GHz Opteron system and the 3.6GHz P4 system. I'd have to say the P4 is transcoding about 15% faster, file-by-file, but it's about 80% slower in terms of list handling and file reading. A list refresh (re-ordering about 11,600 files in the list view) takes around 13 seconds on the quadcore system, and around 75 - 130 seconds on the P4, depending on the column and data length in each column. All the file names and metadata was absolutely identical. I know some of this will be due to the different networking configurations and motherboards, but still, the actual data conversion process is pretty consistent. I'm happy to try out any changes or any suggestions if that would help to improve Switch on the 64-bit platform, but for now, I have a workaround. Cheers, PCPete

I'm using Switch 2.01 to perform a folder/path conversion of around 12,000 valid PCM wave files (44.1k/16/2) to (any) format. What happens is when I begin the conversion, switch prompts for the root path (in this case, since I added all the files and folders recursively under D:\My Music\) which is D:\My Music (if I add the trailing slash, or append any slash to the destination path, Switch bugs out and prepends a double backslash and fails immediately, so that's why I specify the source and destinations with no trailing slash character). With "Copy Folder Structure of Source Files" switched ON, Switch randomly and repeatedly fails on valid conversions with the error : The file d:\my music\artist\album\artist_album_track#_title.wav could not be converted because its path is not found within the base folder you specified. Which of course is wrong, because I added the source files recursively from within Switch from that base path, and specified the same path in the prompt after I start the conversion off each time, and ensured that I manually removed all invalid filetypes and corrupt source files before I began each conversion. This happens regardless of the encoder used, and happens completely randomly - I can set up a hundred files to convert, start it off, and it will fail on different files each time I restart it, and sometimes won't fail at all, unless I run it again on the same files, in which case it randomly fails somewhere else in the same list each time. When this randomly occurs, it's usually just AFTER Switch actually performs the conversion, and the "failing file" seems to be listed twice in the source list. In other words, with the error dialog displayed, the last "completed" entry in the file list in the main window seems to be duplicated somehow and the next (all lower-cased) entry of the same name is what's highlighted. I can absolutely attest and affirm that there are NO duplicates in the list each time I kick off the conversion, so I think Switch is somehow getting out of synch with itself, probably just before it opens the next entry in the source list but before the destination for the last entry has closed - this happens much more often with the destination as a networked folder. I then close the dialog, delete the converted source entries and restart, and then I go through manually re-specifying the root or base folder path, and Switch carries on for another 2 or 300 or 1266 files until it gets confused again and halts the conversion again with a different file but the same error. Since I'm trying to convert more than 12,000 files, this is an astonishingly painful and time-consuming process! After 2 days and 60 failures, I'm still looking at over 9,000 files still to convert and.... (Oh great, it just happened again. It got through 16 files this time! woo hoo!) I've looked in the system event logs, and nothing is reported for switch. I'll retry the next operation with debugview running and see if something appears there. FYI, I couldn't actually search these forums for any of the key words in the error dialog, they all are less than the minimum search length. So I apologise if this is already raised as an issue.

I'm running a Radeon X1600 (PCIe-x4, 256MB, it identifies as an ATI RV530XT internally) with WDM drivers to capture/monitor an analogue security camera on the ATI T200 input. I also use a DV deck for my business (video transfer/repair etc). Both these devices work perfectly with all other video software, but currently I use Eyecopia 2.0 on the ATI device exclusively, and I capture using various other software as appropriate over the Firewire port. Eyeline correctly identifies both video in devices (DV camera via OHCI Firewire, and the ATI device), so both show up in the dropdown box, but when I try to add a "camera", it always fails with "Unable to start device: ATI T200 AVStream analog capture" (if I try to connect to the ATI device) or "Unable to start device: Microsoft DV Camera and VCR". (Actually, just verifying to get the exact text, for the first time in an hour or more, Eyeline finally managed to connect to the DV camera, and I can't reproduce the error any more. Grrrr.) So we're down to the critical camera only experiencing problems (damn that Murphy)... The system is running Windows XP Professional x64 edition, build 3790 SP2 + all hotfixes. The video (WDM) driver is 6.14.0010.6734 . I've stopped (unloaded) all software that could possibly be using either of the input devices mentioned. And if I start Eyecopia, it detects and uses the same camera/video input perfectly, so I'm fairly sure the hardware/software is mostly OK. Initially, both Eyeline and Debut complained about missing codecs, but I can't duplicate that error either, even after uninstalling and reinstalling both bits of software, so I'm not quite sure what's going on with the codec checking. Rebooting is NOT an option unless there's a cast-iron guarantee of fixing any issues, as this is an always-on system and it's running very long-term background data processing that can't be stopped at this time. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to identify what codecs are installed, and what codecs are missing (assuming it's just a codec problem), I'll be happy to help out. I have GSpot installed, and it doesn't seem to identify any problem codecs with the exception of the "Subtitle VMR Filter".

Yeah, I forgot about the other command separator characters in filenames, only because I now always rename them when I'm ripping/copying. That's from bitter experience. That and UNICODE filenames. Same holds true for +,^`' and " too. The script also needs to be executed from in the root of the music folders, i.e. with all the artist folders (or album folders if you use album\artist paths), but it should have worked on almost any two-level tree structure. Maybe I missed another compatibility problem...

I know what you mean... I've got a 2Tb RAID drive (video editing) and a 1.2Tb RAID drive (audio editing and music library), and between them there's less than 400G free. I gotta do some housecleaning sometime... When I used to be a computer guru, we had a saying : Data expands to fill all available space. We were only half-kidding, but it's absolutely true. Gone are the days when we'd say "Who the hell needs six hundred and forty K RAM? What a waste!"

I'm listening! I've tried a lot of batch converters, but they all fall in a heap with high-res PCM (192k/24 or even 96/24) files, and not one of the ones I've tried (including FLAC) that work on XP x64, can handle unicode names, RIFF tags, BWF, BEXT, or CART chunk data. So I'm always interested.

You're completely welcome. Glad I could help. Yeah, it looks like the developers have done that by design - it would be so easy for a tiny slip to delete the source files even if the conversion didn't happen the way you wanted. I think of it as a command-line airbag. Not sure what you mean by searching in XP... but I agree it's primitive. I use a tool called 4NT from JPSoft. It's a DOS/CMD replacement, and it's just the most powerful and flexible tool around, if you have to work with command lines. You can search for files with different extensions or date ranges and delete them if the other file exists, all that kind of stuff. It's US$49 (I think), and if you do any command-line work, you'll be in heaven. I've been using it since, er, 1996, so I know it inside and out. Only problem - when you don't have access to it, DOS looks like a sad, empty, useless tool. Which it is, of course! (I'm not affiliated with JPSoft, I just love their stuff). And if you want the same thing for explorer, try Directory Opus. It's just incredible. Like explorer on steroids. And you CAN use that to find and batch rename and archive and just about anything you want in one go. And you can create collections and favourites, and it handles audio and video previews, all that stuff. I'm not a big user of MP3 stuff, so I'm not sure about the stereo alternatives. I know that some players are really inefficient when fed with one type of stereo encoding vs the other, but I'm not sure which ones, nor why. Try both, see which ones ring your bell!

ElastomerGuy, please try the following batch file and see how you go with it. There are a couple of things you need to be aware of before trying this batch file. First, it will ONLY run in a command shell in Windows XP (Home, Professional, or x64 edition). If you're running Windows 98 or earlier, this won't work. I'm not sure about windows 2000, or NT, or Me. Second, it depends on two things: 1) there are no tildes (~) in any of your folder names, and 2) Your music folder structure is always <whatever music root folder>\Artist\Album\files.mp3 It's not really important whether the directory structure is artist\album or album\artist, just as long as there are only two "layers" of directories. This is a REALLY difficult thing for windows (well, CMD anyway) to do, so the batch file is neither elegant nor fast, but it should work on your system. Be aware, once you start this sucker, you're going to have a hell of a time trying to get it to stop- unless you have a quick ctrl-C trigger finger! I've tested this on two systems and it seemed to work, but occasionally Switch stops responding and the batch file starts running real fast. In that case, you need to stop the script, exit the DOS prompt, kill any Switch processes still running, and open a new DOS prompt and try it again. Note that if this does happen, you will end up starting over from scratch. You can avoid this by changing the overwrite command to -overwrite PROMPT (instead of -overwrite ALWAYS). You should probably cut and paste this, as the quotes and back quotes are critical, unless you know what you're doing. This also depends on the output directory structure already existing, as per the other thread you posted. Good luck, and let me know if this works! -PC Pete

That would be really great, especially since my "fix" doesn't actually work as expected on standard DOS/CMD prompts. D'oh. I apologise for setting up an incorrect answer... This is a major limitation of the command prompt, and I'm trying to find a good workaround... I can get it to work fine in 4NT, and with some tricks, in Windows XP's command shell, but doing the same thing in all standard command prompts is really hard without programming to help! Stay tuned.

You can use the XCOPY command to "pre-create" the same folder structure. Try: XCOPY H:\Music\ H:\MP3\ /T /E Be sure to append the \'s to the paths, and you'll have to put the source and destination paths in quotes if they contain spaces. You could add this line to the NCH.BAT to automagically do the same thing every time you run it, but it's pretty time-consuming, and you'd normally only do it once, then use Explorer to rename or move the new folder structure much more simply! Hope this helps! PC Pete

ElastomerGuy, change the batch file slightly so it looks like: It doesn't do all the fancy "this is the input folder" "this is the output folder", but that's why it wasn't working as expected (and why it wouldn't work if you weren't in the topmost music folder). This batch file should work in most Windows-type DOS prompts, including CMD.EXE, 4DOS/4NT/Take Command, and probably Windows Powershell. I haven't figured out all the different command line options for Switch (I've never used it before, so I'm learning fast!). So at the moment, the script prompts for each new folder, and it's not smart enough NOT to try and convert non-audio files (which is a bit of a problem if you store album artwork or lyrics in the same folder, but that's not NCH's fault!) Let me know if there are any problems. Cheers, PC Pete (P.S. I'm in the same boat as you - I've got about 7,000+ PCM files in 780+ folders that I need to convert to FLAC, and Switch is the first program I've found that comes close to what I'm after! Good luck!)