I'm looking at getting an iPod this christmas, so I decided to install iTunes and see if I liked it, since I figure it will be the best way to sync my iPod. I set about writing a script to give all my songs ratings based on another system I use. It took a while, but finally worked. I imported my library into iTunes and all was good - except that when I closed and reopened iTunes, it suddenly couldn't find any of my songs.

After copious fiddling around, I discovered that iTunes is storing my filenames as, for example:
Artist%20-%20Track%20Name.mp3/
So for some reason it's treating files as URLs, which is probably to make it interoperable with media from the net. Fine. So why can't it read back the information it wrote?

I tried editing the file, and putting the filename as just Artist - Track Name.mp3, and now it works fine. A simple urldecode could script the process, but this is stupid. Why does iTunes deliberately write url encoded filenames, and then can't even read them back in?

Update:
The above seemed to be the case for importing, but now I've run into an entirely different problem once my songs are all into iTunes. After I close and reopen the program, suddenly it can't find any of my files. Nothing new here. Actually I lie, it can find a few which I added manually. I had a look in the Library.xml file to see what difference there was between the files it could and couldn't find, and suddenly it seems to have taken to using the entire file-path when importing, and only the ones with full file paths can be found. But the really stupid part is that it has the "Music Folder" set correctly, so if the relative filenames were just appended to this string it would find the files. But no, iTunes continues to amaze me in its utter stupidity and unreliability.

I want to give up, but I feel like I'm just so damn close...