File naming conventions - no spaces?

I'm working as an assistant on a project and noticed that the editor had used music files that had spaces in the track names. Should I rename the files to use underscores instead of spaces? Or is it not completely necessary?

I did research this in past forum threads, but it didn't seem to have any definitive answers.

Leave them alone. Most modern computers can deal with spaces. I use them myself because spaces are much faster to type, and in 15 years of editing I've never had a single problem on Mac platforms because of it.

However, don't allow symbols other than - or _ (dash or underscore). Backslashes \ are deadly.


www.derekmok.com

IMO, spaces are fine unless you are transferring the project cross platform. But the other illegal characters such as forward and backward slashes. Now, that will screw you over.



www.strypesinpost.com

yeah, don't worry about the spaces.

but DO worry about the file format.
are those music clips mp3s or similar?

they need to be converted to AIFFs.


nick