[bounce]

Thanks, I'd been reading the manual, experimenting for hours with settings, and still can't make heads or tails of how to do it. Surely, I don't have to learn regex expressions to preserve the full file name on conversion and not add "unknown"?

In preferences: I'd already had "Read metadata from file contents instead of file name" checked to off.

I've also been reading another thread similar to what I wanted to do (keep full file name and don't add "unknown" author) and they mentioned to uncheck read metadata from file contents and to also:

1. Open Preferences
2. In Preferences, choose Adding Books (in the Import/export section)
3. In Adding Books, uncheck "Read metadata from file contents rather than file name"
4. In the "Configure metadata from filename box", there is a drop down menu under Regular expression. Choose (?P<title>.+)
5. Click Apply, close Preferences and you are done.

Another change I made was to stop Calibre from appending "- Unknown" to the end of all my filenames (e.g., "the author"):

Go to Preferences, "Sending books to devices":
Change "save template" to {author_sort}/{title}

I'd done all of the above and I'm still getting "unknown" added to the file name and the original full file names are still being cut off.