I was using my favorite audio player/manager,
MediaMonkey, this
afternoon and ran into a really annoying bug. All of the songs in a particular album
would play except for one. MediaMonkey would just skip the file, no error or anything.
At first I thought the file was “corrupt”, but it couldn’t be.
It had only been ripped a few weeks ago, and plays fine in other players, such as
Winamp, VLC and Foobar2000. I started to think logically about the problem, and
noticed that particular track had parenthesis in it’s filename. I removed
the parathesis, and replaced them with another character. Nope, still skipping.
So I thought more, and concluded that the filename was the longest filename on the
album. I removed a few characters and tried again. Voila, now it works!
I do some research and find that MediaMonkey (at least the new beta for Vista) uses the Quicktime API to playback AAC
files. I decided to try an experiment, and attempted to load the troublesome file
(with it’s long filename) into Quicktime via Quicktime’s own “open
file” menu. It’s leads me to a wonderfully unhelpful error message of
“Error -37: a bad filename or volume name was encountered”. Oh, really?
Doing even further research, it seems that Quicktime can’t handle a file with
a name longer than 60 characters. What the crap?
Searching around the web, I find a handful of people who have run into this same problem. Why
hasn’t this been fixed yet? Is this why iTunes automatically stores most songs in a “cut off filename”
state when “Keep my iTunes Folder Organized” is checked?
Ugh. Will someone at Apple get their head outta their butt, fire the entire Quicktime/iTunes
for Windows development staff, and start over? I’m tired of it crashing, having exploits, making my computer slow to a crawl, and not playing back “HD” content on even screaming-fast
PCs. All major reasons I switched to MediaMonkey. But alas,
since MediaMonkey relies on Quicktime for it’s AAC playback, I’m going
to have to truncate all my AAC filenames until a fix comes out.
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