Adventures in Cross-Platform Living: Stupid lousy Windows file name truncation...

See, I come from Steveland - a wonderful place where file names can just about be as long as they need to be, because that's how *nixes are (up to 255 Unicode characters). And the iTunes Music Store (iTMS from here on in) is a Steveland edifice, and it's where I buy my music. Some time ago, for various academic reasons, I switched to Windows XP for my primary "productivity" platform, and MacOS became strictly a creative space. My digital audio and graphic design efforts all take place back in Steveland.

So what's the point of all this? It's this: when I moved my iTunes library over to my new PC, I spent several days re-associating songs with their files in cases where the song (file name) or album title (directory name) was too long for XP. When I copied the stuff over, XP truncated those file and directory names, but the iTunes database records were unchanged. I posted about all this before. Now, I've updated to iTunes 6 so I can buy episodes of Lost from the iTMS, and guess what? It appears to have re-broken a bunch of those linkages I spent several hours fixing. Sheesh...