hash ''#' character in playlist

Start with an MP3 - call it "01 - Classical in G# minor.mp3" Double-click on it and it plays fine in VLC (3.0.4, and win 8.1 64). Copy that file into an existing playlist (test.m3u), using Notepad as a editor. All files in my test.m3u are found and play fine except for the file with the '#' character in it (please assume that I really do understand pathnames!). Now as a test, rename the mp3 file to "01 - Classical in G minor.mp3" and edit the name in the m3u file to be the same. It now plays.

Conclusion -> # is OK in file names opened directly into VLC, but not in a simple text-based m3u playlist file....

This makes my classical music collection a bit unusable with playlists, and I don't want to rename hundreds of files as '#' is normally allowed character in windows files....