iPod classic 160GB skipping songs

I think I might know why the iPod Classic is skipping songs.
I have Noticed that if you right click on a song that has skipped in iTunes and select get info under encoded with it says 'Unknown' whereas if you look at a song on an album were no songs skip it will say what it was encoded with E.G. iTunes v.7.5.

Im not 100% but maybe the iPod skips some songs because it cannot find this information so maybe the firmware should be changed to ignore this?

Im not an expert obviously and this could all be wrong but I have noticed all the songs that skip on mine have 'Unknown' under Encoded With.
The way I have solved this is to right click the songs and choose convert to mp3 as others have suggested.

I have 80g Classic and recently had the same issue.

Playing one track then stopping
Playing only a few mins then stopping
Art not showing up

This is what worked for me..

I defraged the Ipod Hard Drive. Once it finished I got the REboot apple then it came up fine.. so far no more problems.

Once I thought about it. I started having problems after I removed several CD's

Hope this helps. Please let me know

how do you defrag an iPod?

hook up your Ipod
Set your Itunes to Manually Manage Music. This will Enable use as disc.
then uncheck the open Itunes when when ipod is connected. eject your Ipod
Close Itunes.
Hook up your Ipod again. once is saids connected
goto your windows Defrag and choose the Ipod Drive letter.

Keep in mind this will take a while and don't stop it in the middle of the defrag once you start let it finish.

once done
reset your setting how you want them

Does defraging the iPod work and is it safe?

I wouldn't want to risk damaging my iPod.

I've Defraged mine 3 times and I haven't had a problem defraging it so far.

I've also found that this fix works - although the 'convert to MP3' step is sufficient without the additional step of converting the ID3 tags.

This is almost certainly a problem with the OS on the most recent iPod classics. My entire 4500 song library of MP3 files sampled at 96kps played fine on my original iPod. My new iPod classic (80GB) will skip on a significant number of the tracks (sometimes straight away, sometimes part way through, but always at the same place on an individual track). By "converting to MP3" I end up with a file which is larger and iTunes and the iPod thinks is sampled at 192kps (but clearly can't be any better quality than the original 92kps file) and plays it fine!

It seems ridiculous to me that these things aren't backwards compatible with their own hardware and software.

I went back to the shop and told them about this problem. I explained that the problem did not occur on my 40G iPod, but still they were convinced it was in the songs.
They said they never heared of this kind of problems before so I gave them a print of this forum.
They also said that it could not be in the iPod since it were the same songs over and over having the problem. In order to prove they were right they gave me a new iPod. The songs kept on skipping and they said this proved it was not a problem of Apple.

Of course they eliminated that particular iPod as reason for my problems, but not that type of iPod or the software inside it.

I must say that I am pretty frustrated because my 40G lasted for a little over a year. I hardly ever used it, only when I went abroad for my work. So now I'm looking at € 900,- worth of iPod on my desk and I cannot use any of it.

yeah.. welcome to the club. Me too. I think the mp3 decoder is more picky than
the xmms, or even my 4th generation ipod. My 4th generation ipod has a couple
of mp3 files with a little garbage in the beginning and then they are fine... the
classic won't even play them at all.

I had the same problem. What i did was go into Itunes, right click the file and selected convert to AAC format. then i went and deleted the old file and just kept the AAC. I then resynced my ipod and it works!

DJ