sfplay preload

I've seen a lot of posts about sfplay, but can't find anything about this specific problem I'm having.

I'm
simply trying to load wav files into either an sfplay~ object or an sflist~ object to be referenced. ( I am running the latest version of max on os 10.4 ). I have a list of files in a text file formatted for a coll object. The filepaths are dumped out of the coll and sequentially added to the sfplay~ object using the preload command. The problem is that max never is able to find the files. I'm using the full file path as the argument, for example "Hard Drive:/Users/Colin/Desktop/Max/file.wav". I've also tried just "/Users/Colin/Desktop/Max/file.wav". That did not work, so I tried adding the directory to the list of search paths in max and then opening the file using the filename. This did not work at first, however, I changed the filename to temp.wav and it did. The original file was formatted as artist_album_track_name_temp.wav. I then shortened this to artist_track_name.wav and it did work. There are no strange characters in any of the directory or filenames, only a-z and underscores. Is there a limitation to the number of characters that max can read into an sfplay open argument?? That seems very unlikely but I really don't know what to do.

Thanks in advance anyone that can help!

-Colin