I have many FLAC tracks with a "/" character in title where the file name replaces the "/" with the string "%2f" (probably something I configured in the CD ripper I used at that time, because I also use that ext3 partition in Windows at work, and that seems to have a problem with the "/").

I'm pretty sure that until 2.4, these used to work fine, as some of them are tracks I play quite frequently. With 2.4, the collection scanner has no problem with these files, they all appear in the collection (and I did a full rescan since upgrading, so the database should be up to date). But it refuses to *play* the files - whenever a file with a name like this is encountered, Amarok just skips to the next track.

Renaming the files and replacing the "%2f" e.g. with a dash character, fixes the problem. However, since Amarok doesn't even give a warning but just skips the problematic files, I'd have to do a search/rename over my entire collection to locate and fix all of these.

Is that a known problem/are there any better workarounds? (If there's already a bug report for this, I couldn't find it)

Please avoid special chars in the filename. Tracks are sorted by tags. So it is not a big issue to remove them during ripping/taggiing. And the slash? Come on, this is announced trouble.
Classic AC/DC issue

m0nk

I would avoid them for new files, but these are files that have been working for years. And seriously, it shouldn't be an issue. The file system can deal with them, all file clients in KDE can deal with them, Amarok has always been able to play them and the collection scanner can STILL deal with them. It's just the playback code that apparently got slightly messed up in the latest update.

If the scanning part of Amarok can read the files, the playback part shouldn't have any trouble.

Unfortunately playback isn't part of Amarok, but phonon. Perhaps Amarok doesn't mask the slash correct.

I didn't realise that Phonon is also responsible for reading the audio files, but switching from the xine to the VLC backend did indeed fix this problem. So I guess it wasn't the Amarok update that introduced it, but the recent upgrade to KDE 4.6.

(As a side note, the VLC backend also seems to have fixed the cut off track endings which I've been suffering from pretty much ever since switching to Amarok 2. I'm now getting somewhat frequent micro stutters all over the tracks though - will have to investigate that further)

I had a similar problem, but the character I was having trouble with was # and :. I can almost understand : causing trouble, but #?

Thanks for your solution. I also changed my back-end from GStreamer to VLC and it has solved the problem now.