iPod cuts off in the middle of SOME songs

EDIT - Just tried the firmware restore out of curiosity, NO CHANGE. My iPod still cuts off the last 3-8 seconds of the last track. Absolutely bl**dy useless. So it seems these problems are STILL here after people on these forums posting about the problems for over 6 months.

I used to like Apple due to the different way they went about handling things vs. Microsoft.... but this proves they don't give a rats backside about the customer once they have your money.

Disgusting.

You'd think some of the administrators running these forums would have alerted Apple to these problems by now?......

So folks, if I was you I'd only use iTunes for updating the firmware on your iPods. Otherwise for music and iPod useage download Foobar2000 (with the appropriate plug ins) which is free, and which is run and maintained by people that CARE and fix problems if/when they occur.....

This also happens me. I dont use itunes though, i think its a terrible piece of software. I use mediamonkey. It happened on my 80GB and my new 120GB ipod. Its so god **** annoying. You can hear the rest of the song if you press the center button twice and move the slider slightly (even back to the exact spot you are on). Going to try foobar now....

then again.....


foo_pod is officially on my "Not Recommend" list. Since it has not been kept up-to-date, nor has the developer released the source code so anyone else could keep it up to date, it has slowly become incompatible with the very products it was designed to manage in the first place.

* After installing the latest version of iTunes, foo_pod will cause Foobar2000 to crash on startup.
* When copying tracks to and from someone else's iPod, which has only been managed with iTunes, it causes problems:
o sometimes the iPod won't play the tracks you've copied,
o sometimes iTunes will refuse to play anything on the iPod.
o I suspect that it's writing in a database format that the latest version of iTunes cannot understand anymore.

This doesn't mean you should stop using it. There's no problem if you are not sharing your iPod with anyone else. There's also no problem if you are not connecting anyone else's iPod to your computer. There's no problem as long as you don't have any friends. But once you introduce another iPod or another computer into the equation, things start to break (and you might lose those friends). Considering the popularity of iPods these days, you are very likely to find yourself in a situation where you have multiple iPods to manage. Unfortunately, there's no one around to fix foo_pod. I can't fix it. The developer refuses to fix it. And if it's going to cause problems, well.. remember the old joke:

"Hey doc, it hurts when I do this!"
then your doctor says, "So stop doing that."

Do I have any other recommendations? Not at the moment. Nothing else supports "Alternate Metadata", nothing else can rebuild the database after you've copied a bunch of files with your own naming scheme, nothing else translates ReplayGain data into SoundCheck data, and the only other iPod transfer software for Foobar2000 is not very stable, and doesn't have very many features.

I have the same problem with my brand new iPod Classic. It has the latest everything. I tried the reset and restore and same problems. It happens with brand new songs just purchased off of iTuunes. Never skips in the exact same spot. When it skips, if you go back and play that same song again, it will play back fine. I was just about to return it, but while searching on the internet, I found some suggestions to defrag the iPod HDD. Since nothing else was working, I finally decided to defrag the HDD using Disk Keeper and that seemed to take care of the problem. I have been playing songs for 3-4 hours straight and it hasn't skipped once. Before, it used to skip every 10 to 15 mins. I think it's might be a problem with the HDD not being able to keep up reading the information fast enough when it's scatter all over the HDD. Maybe the cache on the HDD is not big enough or the HDD is just too slow. Also I noticed that battery seems to last longer now. Doesn't seem to drain as fast. Maybe it's because I don't have to keep on clicking the back button every time it skips a song along with the fact that all of the files are now contiguous, and it doesn't have to seek as much to find the song.

However, I believe this is poorly designed product if you have to defrag your device to get around a problem like this.

Your problem is different from mine. If a song doesn't end at the same point or if it will end early on one occasion but not on another, it's a discrete issue from the one I've been "preaching" about. In your case it very well could be a hard drive issue or a fragmentation issue. For me it's an issue with iTunes fouling up the files as it puts them on the iPod. I could get the fragmentation down to zero and still have the songs end early; it's because it's working perfectly and doing what it should but iTunes gave it a bad file.

With my new 120gb Classic the skipping problem very much varies with the dock I use. The worst is a Logitech MM50 speaker dock working on battery where I get a skip in virtually every album I play. The Logitech works better when plugged into the mains. Next is an Apple 4th gen IPOD dock without a power adapter when it appears to skip perhaps every 4th album, using the power adapter allowed the album I was experimenting with to play right through. Same also with a Griffin Tunedock, which is powered, the album played fine. What I haven't yet experimented with is using headphones. The available power does seem to be a factor.

So perhaps everybody could report back here on their experiences with different combinations.

I tried not just restoring the Classic, which didn't help, but also erasing (and zeroing) the IPOD disk in Disk Utilities, still didn't work. However I have just deleted the album I used above (which was originally imported with ITUNES 5) and reimported direct from the CD, it works fine now. The next time I'm going to try the uncheck/sync/recheck/resync route. This does seem to indicate that only certain tracks get corrupted during sync and that restoring the IPOD may just spread the problem around.

Lastly I have just downloaded ITunes 7.6, has anyone tried going back to it yet?

My 160 gb classic had been randomly pausing songs for a second or two for some time, perhaps since I got it. It began to annoy me more and more.

So, I made three trips about it to the Apple Genius Bar. All of the three Geniuses I met with said they had never heard of this problem. First two trips were full of useless advice. Last trip (a few days ago), they finally gave me a new iPod and I haven't had a problem since.

This would lead me to think that this is a hardware issue.

Just FYI, this same issue is happening with my iPhone 3G, although it seems to happen at random points in the song (rather than just 30 seconds in). Either way, the common denominator does seem to be iTunes...

If you are having issues with songs randomly skipping(cut short), please notify Apple by either e-mail or phone. I have had this exact problem with 4 different iPod classics and every time I complain to Apple they act like I am the only person in the world with this issue.

In agree. There are a number of threads on this board talking about the same problem. I have no idea what causes it but I for one feel that Apple are doing their customers a disservice by not addressing it. I feel some collective action is called for but not sure what will have the most effect yet. Anyone any ideas?

Nope; it's probably not a hardware issue. It's probably iTunes. I posted my findings in the thread referenced above.

( http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1976807&tstart=0)

Another user here with the same issue.
I've formatted the ipod several times seeing that resync does not help.
Still got the same issue.