iTunes Truncating the m4a file name and title metadata

Hello-

I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64, all updates installed. iTunes 12.3.2.35 x64. I have a very large library (~4000 albums, ~50K files), mostly of music I ripped from my personal collection about 10 years back.

As a result, I'm meticulous about folder and file names, including the metadata. I recently noticed, that albums purchased on iTunes were downloading with Folder, File, and metadata song titles truncated if the name exceeds ~36 characters, not counting the .m4a extension.

So for example, the file:

This is a very long song name with a (note in brackets).m4a

Will download as:

This is a very long song name with a.m4a

It displays the same in iTunes. Deleting and re-downloading the track does not work. This is further complicated by the fact that iTunes does not let you remove an album from iTunes without hiding it and then going into your account and un-hiding it. A tedious task if you have to do this more than a few times to say the least.

I have never enabled the "allow iTunes to manage my music" option as I was burned by "programmer assumptions" a long time ago (Windows Media player decided to down sample 500 album covers that I had scanned/downloaded before it was easy to do so).

I'm stumped as to why this is happening but would love it if someone could figure out why. This appears to be a recent problem as I have some albums a few years old that I KNOW had complete file names and embedded titles before something changed.

It fortunately is NOT doing this to music that I ripped. Only to the music that I have downloaded. Maybe because all of my ripped content are MP3s??? This only appears to impact iTunes m4a content.