I have audacious set to randomly play my collection of audio files. There are no problems with this, however, from time to time, with apparent randomness, Audacious will bring up a dialog saying "Error opening file" a file name and "Unknown playback error."

I have begun to check when this happens, if I happen to be at the computer. Every time I have checked, the file exists and is valid. If I happen to be at the computer when it happens, Audacious will be playing the very file that it claimed was problematic!

Has anyone else had this happen?

Obviously, I can ignore this, as nothing serious is actually occurring, but I am curious as to what is going on.

Thank you in advance.

p.s. Slackware 64 -current, though I think it did it also in 14.1, not entirely sure.

I receive a similar message if I use a playlist and then modify the path or filename of one or more files. Audacious skips the file it cannot find, and moves to the next item in the playlist.

In your case if audacious is actually playing the file that the error is about, try initially launching audacious from command line and see if you get any additional info. You can even use audacious -V for a more verbose output (or -VV for a massive amount of debug text).