First problem: The phrase "...are highlighted" couldn't be more confusing if you tried. I got this warning the first time I ever used the feature, so naturally I thought that by "highlighted" you were referring to all the files that were highlighted with a bright yellow background. In many programs (eg. MSWord) "highlighting" does exactly that: it highlights words with a bright yellow background. Similarly, a flourescent yellow pen is, at least here in Australia, called a "highlighter". So my first thought when seeing all those yellow filenames was 'holy crap! - that's a lot of duplicate or overly long filenames - what's going on here?". It took me ages to realise that you meant the files in red (they were way down the bottom of the list so it took me ages to even see them).
Second problem: As I mentioned, it took me ages to even see the red filenames, as they were buried way down in a sea of thousands of yellow filenames. Why weren't they displayed upfront? If an action is required of me to fix them, why force me to find them one by one in a small scrollable list?
Third problem: Once I finally realised which files you were talking about, and once I finally scrolled down and located them all, I still didn't know what the problem was. Were they duplicates, or were they too long, or were some of them both? After making me dredge through the huge list and find the red files on my own, you now required me to study each of their pathnames and figure out for myself what your issue with them was. Why not add flags or icons to them to better identify the problems for me?
Fourth problem: Once I figured out what the problems were, I still didn't really know what to do about it. All you say is to "edit" them before continuing. That gave me the impression that I could do that editing in the current popup window. But that didn't seem to be the case.
Fifth Problem: And anyway, what happens if I just press OK? I don't know, because that big red warning scares me off from pressing OK in case I muck up my collection. But I suspect that perhaps if I press OK it'll do two things: (1) It'll truncate any long filenames to under 255 characters (or whatever the limit is), and (2) it'll consolidate duplicate files into single files. In other words, it'll solve both problems on its own. If so, why make me go through all the above crap and why explicitly tell me to edit the files manually? Why not just say something like "If you continue, all overly-long filenames will be truncated, and all duplicate files will be removed. Please edit the source files if you don't want this to happen"?
That whole needless rigamorole was my introduction to MediaMonkey Gold: after buying it, the first thing I happened to do was check out the auto-sorting feature to see what exactly it was and how it worked. It wasn't the best of introductions. I'm sure I'm not the first person this has happened to.
It seems to me that most, if not all, of the above problems would be solved with some simple rewording of the text in the dialog box. Alternatively, you could force the user to select certain choices via radio buttons before continuing. For example:
FOR OVERLY LONG FILES:
- Truncate all overly-long filenames after 255 characters
- Where possible, keep artist, album, genre, etc. intact, but truncate titles
- Prompt me to rename filenames one by one
- Delete all duplicate files
- add (2) to the end of all duplicate filenames
- Ask me what to do with duplicate files one by one