convert windows file names

[James Miller]

Among various frustrations recently I've had the gratifying success of 
learning how to use streamripper to augment my music collection. 
Streamripper is a program that writes an audio stream (e.g., from internet 
radio) to your hard drive as an mp3 file. This is about the closest thing 
to the mythical "Rivo" (Tivo for radio) that currently exists, I think, 
and could maybe serve as the basis for a *real* Rivo-type program, should 
someone really decide to develop one.

Despite the success, there are some problems--mainly having to do with 
file names. I've found a nice commercial-free classical (Baroque) station 
and have been happily recording away for the last 24 hrs or so. The 
streamripper program was evidently written for rock or more popular genres 
and tries to detect breaks between songs so as to make discrete files from 
them. For whatever strange reason, it has a problem detecting beginnings 
and endings between movements in classical music (despite the noticeable 
pause) and wants to break between movements about 30 seconds into the next 
movement, rather than at the pause. The cat command seems to fix this, 
though:

cat movement1.mp3 >full-piece.mp3
cat movement2.mp3 >>full-piece.mp3
cat movement3.mp3 >>full-piece.mp3
The breaks at 30 seconds into the following movement are hardly even 
noticeable in the full-piece.mp3 (I don't have the kind of purist 
standards I used to when it comes to audio quality, though).

But, on to file names. unfortunately, the names for the pieces I'm 
recording from this station follow Windows long-file-naming conventions. 
Even worse, the names tend to be quite complex and long. Here are a couple 
of examples:

Anton\ Reicha-\ Albert\ Schweitzer\ Quintett\ -\ Wind\ Quintet\ No.9\ 
in\ D\ major\ Op.91\ No.3-\ Finale-\ Allegretto.mp3

Patrick\ Cohen\ \&\ Mosaiques\ Quartet\ -\ Quintet\ For\ Piano\ \&\ 
Strings\ In\ D\ Major\,\ Op.56��5\,\ G411\ -��.\ Andante\ Come\ 
Prima.mp3

Feeding those names to cat so I can join the movements into a single file 
is going to be a major pain in the wazoo, as they say down at symphony 
hall. What I was hoping to find is a script that would automatically 
convert all the wierd characters into more standard Unix file-naming 
characters. But so far I've come up empty-handed. Can anyone point me to 
some utility that might do what I need?

As a last resort, I might try to write my own script. I'm not too hot on 
doing that though, since I'm at an extremely rudimentary level when it 
comes to script writing. If it comes to that, could someone maybe help me 
get started by giving an example for a script that would do the renaming I 
want? I'd like to retain the bulk of the information, though I don't mind 
truncating words at, say 5 letters. I suppose the main thing would be 
replaing all the spaces and/or punctuation with dashes and/or underscores.

Thanks, James