This problem is now occurring for roughly about 1/3 of my music on the classic ipod (160GB). I select a band, select a song, press play, but nothing happens and the time stays on zero seconds even though there is the play sign in the top right hand corner, pausing and trying again still doesn't help.
Have you tried a reboot of the ipod? - this issue happens with my ipod classic 80Gb and it is always the same tracks with the same errors when it occurs so I suspect it is the area of the disk that is having an issue.
Flick the lock switch to lock and back to unlock
Hold menu and centre button down for 10 secs (apple logo appears)
Try playing them after a reset and see if they still have the issue.
Probably not related since your issue is specific track related? But this is an issue with the old 5th generation iPods and I have found the cause to be the order in which you attach earbuds and play music. On my 80GB 5th generation, for example, I find it would get stuck in this mode very often if I inserted the headphones FIRST then played something. I would get the play symbol and stuck on 0:00. But if I first start the iPod playing, THEN plug in the headphones, never an issue. Not sure why and others have had the same issue over the years. Patrick
I had a very similar issue, where some albums hung on 0:00 showing as playing and some albums played through all tracks in a second with no audio ie skipping all tracks. Also every time i connected my iPod to my PC the iPod would crash, i would have to disconnect reset (menu and center button Apple logo etc) the re-connect, here was how i solved this issue!
My iTunes instead of having "convert to AAC" was actually set to "convert to MP3" (possibly because all of my files are MP3 and my iTunes is set to rip discs as MP3). I just highlighted one of the albums in question then converted that album to MP3 (even though they were already MP3). Once it had converted as the originals were still high-lighted i just hit delete to get rid of the originals.
This converted my MP3's into an iTunes decoded MP3 which now play on my iPod perfectly. All the audio tags remain the same as original.
After doing a few albums i will still baffled as to why my iPod continued to crash every time my iPod was connected to the PC. When i found another album that did this i looked at the date modified (as the albums in question were all from one particular site and all downloaded in a one week period). I selected a view option for "date modified" and sorted all my files by date, i then selected the albums in the date range that i was suspicious of and converted them all to MP3 (again even though all were already MP3). Once done i deleted the originals moving files to recycle bin.
I then re-synced my iPod. After the sync i connected and disconnected three times and my iPod did not crash once, i also confirmed this again this morning.
Essentially i have come to the conclusion that the fault must have been caused by the MP3 decoder that was used to rip/convert the files, this decoder must be in some way slightly incompatible with an iPodthus why they would not be playable by the iPod and i think the iPod may have seen the files as corrupt which may have been causing the crashes.
I hope my experience may help others solve similat issues.
Have you tried re-ripping any of the offending tracks? It sounds as if there is a problem with the files. I've read that the Classics tend to be more prone than earlier models to encoding issues.
thanks for the help, i reset the ipod and the problem still occurs for the same songs as before, even after re-adding them to itunes. is there anything else i could try?
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Click play, but time stays on 0 seconds
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