UltimusRex's dashboard

I have Songbird 1.2.0 installed and use it to manage and play my music library on my computer. I also use the Orb streaming software to stream .m3u playlists to my game consoles and other computers. Unfortunately, the only way to export playlists in SB (.m3u or any other type) is with the use of the playlist export addon which seems like a particularly messy addon to me (but that's a different story). Orb recognizes and streams the .m3u playlists problem free, as long as the file path noted in the .m3u file uses the correct case, that is, with a capital drive letter, and the proper (title) case format I've used to name all my directories and .mp3 files.

This worked flawlessly many months ago, when the "File Location" column in the Songbird library was correctly displaying the paths in the correct case. A short time after I first installed Songbird, I noticed that all the new music I imported showed the "File Location" as all lowercase, and I soon realized that those songs referenced in all lowercase were not being played in my playlists via my consoles & other computers. I attributed this to a conflicting addon or something. I recently had to reinstall my OS and, of course, Songbird... and I was very excited because I hoped it would all work perfectly again, like it did when I first installed it. But no dice. Now my entire library, newly imported on this fresh install is completely lowercase according to the "File Location" column. So I will not be able to listen to a single song over the Orb streaming software.

Perhaps the problem is in the exporting addon, but I doubt it, since it was working at first, and I don't recall an update to it, and the non-playing tracks have always matched the all-lowercase tracks as reported in the "File Location" column. Also it should be noted that, first of all, all the music plays perfectly fine within Songbird, regardless of the case of the reported file location. And secondly, the .m3u files are not completely unusable... they still work perfectly fine with the likes of CDBurnerXP. So this may be a standards issue with the Orb developers, not observing common practices in their coding, or something. But the fact remains that it was working, then something changed in Songbird (the lowercase thing) and it stopped working. I don't recall if there was a Songbird update around when this happened... I actually didn't notice it for quite a while, since most of my library was still reporting the file location in the correct case and working just fine. Though, when I did notice it, I also noticed that it was actually changing some paths to all lowercase that had been the correct case, and that there were a LOT of duplicates and even triplicates showing up (this took quite a bit of cleanup and was only happening within the Songbird library, not the actual directory where my library is stored).

I'm posting this here, because I didn't really know where to start. And between the Songbird support site, and the Orb support forums, this seemed like a much more knowledgeable and active community with more dedicated developers. The thing that bothers me is that nobody else has reported issues with this. But also, I haven't seen a single other person that uses Songbird and Orb the way I do, with Songbird essentially feeding Orb the playlist files to stream from.