You may find VLC unable to play some files that other players open just fine. You tried to remove those special characters and accents from the files’ path, but no joy. First of all enable logging (by going to Tools – Messages and changing “verbosity” to 2). Try again to play your music and check the Messages for the exact problem. You may see that VLC was unable to find the files on the hard disk!

This happens if you open a playlist containing relative paths, i.e., instead of referring to an audio file using even the hard disk letter (e.g. c:\mymusic\this.mp3) the playlist uses this style: \mymusic\this.mp3. Winamp uses relative paths, if the playlist is on the same disk with the audio files. If the playlist you try to play on VLC was saved with Winamp or a similar player most probably it contains relative paths – and this is something VLC doesn’t like!

To have Winamp save your playlist using absolute (full) paths, just export the playlist to some other drive or partition than the one your audio files are stored. If you don’t have a second drive or partition, then open your playlist to your Notepad and replace the first part of the path adding the disk letter, e.g. search for \mymusic and replace with c:\mymusic.

* Don’t miss VLC Untied, a free program that lets you select one or more files or folders in Windows Explorer and load them to VLC media player instantly using a keyboard shortcut, even removing completely any files that may be already loaded and playing.