This is a new issue to us. We ran a test with 1600 MP3 files added at once and didn't see any errors, but there's always more to these things than meets the eye.
A few items I've gathered from your notes:
- That the errors did not occur consistently could be an indicator the issue is not related to the files themselves.
- That the files, when added a second time to the same Project after the errors occur, ended up with a 1 after their name indicates
something was copied into the Project under the original file name. That something is likely unreadable, leading to an error, and even though you can't see it it is in there so Audiobook Builder must name the second attempt with the extra 1 at the end.
- Audiobook Builder placed freshly-added audio Files at the end of the Chapters list instead of in order. It does not inherently know the proper order to place incoming Files so it sorts alphabetically based on the original files' tags or, if the files aren't tagged, their file names. It tends to be easier to spot the just-added Files, from the user's point of view, if this sorting occurs for each add operation and the sorted results are placed at the end of the Chapters list rather than for all of the Chapters to be re-sorted alphabetically.
- Dragging around in the Chapters list resulted in a Chapter being dropped into another Chapter instead of simply moving. Because Audiobook Builder supports dragging both Chapters and the Files within them things get a little tricky when users need to reorder Chapters. The drop target area for reordering items at a particular level of the outline hierarchy is considerably narrower and shorter than the target area for dragging items into each other. To reorder a Chapter you need to drag it vertically
between two other Chapters and horizontally
to the left of the Chapter bookmark icons appearing in the list. Chapters can also pop open as you drag and hover over them. If you intend to drag a Chapter to just after a Chapter that has popped open and revealed its Files, drag to just below the bottom of the popped open Chapter's Files and to the left of the Chapter bookmark icons. In all cases there will be live feedback in the form of an insertion bar or highlight to show you the final destination of the drag. The insertion bar will have a small circle at its far left to indicate the level of the insertion. If the circle is just to the left of the File document icons and not just to the left of the Chapter bookmark icons the drop will end up inside a Chapter.
Also, having multiple Files in a single Chapter is fine. Before you build Chapters are just groups of Files. After building, those audio files make up the audio data between the enhanced chapter stops you will see in iTunes and on the iPod. Chapters can contain any number of Files.
The primary issue now is the random failure of Audiobook Builder to load your MP3 files. Can you help us get started by reproducing the issue, resulting in the errors you saw before, then creating a System Profiler report while Audiobook Builder is still running and sending the report to us at
support@splasm.com ? You can create a System Profiler report by launching /Applications/Utilities/System Profiler.app and selecting Save from the File menu. Thanks!