iPod classic suddenly changes to next track

Question

Level 1

17 points

iPod classic suddenly changes to next track

Is anyone having problems with their new classic (mine's a 160gb) whereby it suddenly skips to the next song (in the album or playlist) for no reason?

I don't mean skip as in when you go running and the song cuts in and out like on the old discmans, I mean just changes to the next track suddenly. I have checked the songs that it has skipped from in iTunes and they seem fine, aswell upon playing the song again on the iPod, I tried to scrub further into the song and it plays perfectly fine.

So far this has happened about 5 time to me in about 2 days of owning it. I restored twice but still, every once in a while, skip she goes

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.4.10), 2.16GHz, 2GB ram, 160gb HDD Black

Posted on Sep 10, 2007 4:16 AM

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Answer 1

PT

Level 7

20,894 points

Sep 10, 2007 5:21 PM in response to Aidan Dwyer

Hi Aidan,
Below is a post from a while back pre-Classics, but something I found with 5th generation iPod that might be the same issue. Read it, try it and see if you think it is the same thing...
This appears to be a bug in iTunes I think. I have noticed that songs that do this on the iPod always do it. In other words, if you replay it, the hard stop is really there.
What I also found is after I sync back to my iTunes, I go to recently played and look for that song. Note the time and it will likely be the truncated time. Now double click the song and you probably will see the time change back to the correct time as the song begins. Now right click the song and change something about it, like reset the play count or give it a star. Anything that will force it to reupdate back to the iPod.
I find after I do that, the song then plays fine on my iPod.
Because of this bug, I use a 3-star rating to flag truncated songs. In iTunes I have a smart playlist that is all 3-star songs (I normally don't use the star rating except as flags for various issues). So when I am listening to my iPod and I find a truncated song, I go back to the song again (since you have now jumped to the next song) and while it is playing, I click the middle button to go from volume to playback position and again to the star rating screen and I assign it 3-stars. nd now I can skip to the next song and forget about it.
Next time I plug it into my iPod, any 3-star (aka Truncated) songs go to my playlist so I can quickly find which ones had the issue. Double click them to reset the time in iTunes, then reset the stars to zero to remove them from the playlist and force them to be updated back to the iPod. Done!
Patrick

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Answer 2

Sep 11, 2007 4:02 AM in response to Aidan Dwyer

I am having a similar problem with playlists of podcasts. If one of the podcasts in the playlist is partially played (i.e. has a stored playback position), my iPod will skip it.

Also, when I choose the first song in a playlist using the center button, quite often the iPod will immediately skip that track and start playing the next one.

Very annoying.

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Answer 3

Sep 11, 2007 5:46 AM in response to PT

Unfortunately, I have the same issue - some songs will play for the first few seconds then it will jump to the next track. Your solution that worked for the older versions of the iPod does not work. I have reset the play count and made other changes to the songs in iTunes, synced back to the iPod and same problem. Apple needs to fix this soon.

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Answer 4

Sep 11, 2007 6:50 AM in response to Aidan Dwyer

I was having a similar problem with my 5th gen and I found that making sure all my music was in the "itunes music" folder fixed it. Some music was just in "my music" so I moved it to the "itunes", "itunes music" folder and then added it back to my itunes library. The biggest problem was that it messed up my playlists that contained the songs that I had changed the path to. Don't know if this will fix the problem but it worked for me.

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Answer 5

Peggs

Level 1

15 points

Sep 11, 2007 8:26 AM in response to Aidan Dwyer

Hi,

I just had this problem with my Ipod Classic 160GB. The way I fixed it was to burn a CD with the defectivec tracks, then remove them from Itunes and my Ipod and imported the songs back in Itune from the CD. After sincing my Ipod, I didn't have the issue anymore.

I hope this help.

Alain

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Answer 6

Sep 11, 2007 11:21 AM in response to Peggs

Actually - I just noticed your solution to the issue. I tried PT's solution, which I mention above and it didn't work. I haven't tried your solution - however, I have considered it. Here's the problem with it though. The first problem is having to sift through 5400+ songs on my ipod to know which ones are having the issue and which ones need to be burned. The second issues is that the songs are compressed mp3's. Converting the compressed mp3's into a cd and reimporting it back into mp3 further degrades the file - you're essentially making an mp3 from an mp3. It actually makes no sense to do this unless you've purchased your music from an online store and therefore don't have the original cd's. Since all of my music is from my cd collection, it would be simpler to re-import the songs from the cds. But, it's really the first issue I mentioned that is the kicker - I don't want to go through my entire music collection to find out which ones are having the problem. The problem isn't the tracks as far as I am concerned - I still have my previous generation iPod and the same tracks play fine. The same tracks play fine in iTunes and Windows Media Player. The problem is the new iPod. If Apple can't resolve the issue through an iPod/iTunes update in the next week or so, I'll just return the iPod and stick with my old one.

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Answer 7

Sep 11, 2007 2:11 PM in response to Aidan Dwyer

I am also having the same problem with my black 160GB iPod Classic, and it is very irritating. However, just to shed some more light on this issue, I have my iPod set to not sync with my iTunes collection as I wanted to manually manage the content on my iPod. Thus, when I plug my iPod in to the computer and it shows up in my devices on iTunes, the songs aren't grayed out and I can play them straight off the iPod. When I do this though, I notice that the songs that always skip on the iPod don't skip when they are played off the iPod through iTunes... so yeah, it's definitely something wrong with the song-playing software on the ipod classic, not the song file itself.

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Answer 8

jjw13

Level 1

0 points

Sep 11, 2007 2:56 PM in response to oomplexboompound

If the assumption above is correct about having the music in the iTunes folder, instead of manually dragging songs into the iTunes folder, just open iTues, click file, preferences, then the Advanced Tab, and then the General tab. Choosed the Keep iTunes folder organized option, as well as the copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library.

Hope you solve your iPod problems.

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Answer 9

Aidan Dwyer Author

Level 1

17 points

Sep 11, 2007 5:32 PM in response to Aidan Dwyer

hey, thanks for all the advice. I tried resetting the play count, converting id3 tags etc but none of these seem to work. As my library is 9000+ songs i don't want to have to sift through to see which skip and which don't, so I decided on something else.

If I reimport them, they work fine.. so what I did was easy to setup however took overnight for two nights on my macbook.. as I said I have 9000+ songs

I created 4 smart playlist which grouped similar bit rate songs. (1) 64-128kb/s, (2)129-159kb/s (3)160-191kb/s and (4)192+ kb/s. ( i aslo specified to not include videos etc)

Then, in iTunes prefs I set the import encoder to 128kb for the first playlist, selected all of the tracks in that playlist and right-click (ctrl click) and chose 'convert selection to mp3' (you might have it set to aac etc). Afterwards I deleted the original files.

The corresponding bit rates I used for each playlist was (1)128kb/s, (2)160kb/s, (3) 160kb/s and (4) 192kb/s

I changed the bitrate in itunes preferences to the corresponding bit rate of the smart playlist I was about to re-encode.. This way you maintain the same level of quality without increasing filesize, however for some songs that had 190kb/s, I'd just go down to 160Kb/s.

Now you may have much higher or much lower bitrates but if you break your libary into suitable collections of bit rates and set the encoder settings to a desired level you should be able to maintain the same level of bitrate. (It just depends on how many playlists you're willing to create!!)

Remember, it keeps the same information stored within the files and artwork remains embedded, if it wasn't already retrieved from itunes...

my ipod is back in action as it should be without any skips yet!! and I tried the same songs and they don't skip! yay

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Answer 10

cpatch

Level 1

4 points

Sep 17, 2007 10:08 AM in response to Aidan Dwyer

I'm having the same problem and it appears to be a bug in the iPod firmware, not any problem with the skipped tracks...if I go back and try to play the track again it will play on the second or third attempt. So far it has happened with MP3, AAC, and MP4 files. The same files worked fine on my 5G 60GB iPod.

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Answer 11

rich8t7

Level 1

0 points

Sep 18, 2007 4:48 AM in response to Aidan Dwyer

Same problem here, it's happened with podcasts, MP3, and video files. (So basically any file). It only ever happens when I change whats currently playing, like if I play a different album, playlist or if I play something when nothing is currently playing. Its clearly not a problem with files so I'd expect a firmware update soon. I'm currently using firmware 1.0.1 PC so upgrading to this will not solve the problem.

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Answer 12

Aidan Dwyer Author

Level 1

17 points

Jun 27, 2009 4:18 PM in response to Aidan Dwyer

future update fixed the problem

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