Skipping songs

Question

Level 1

10 points

Skipping songs

I have seen this one reported for a quite a while without any concrete resolution.

about 30% of my music library will not play on my iPod classic. When I select the song to play it just skips to the next song. The title, correct length and all of the other info shows up but then the song immediatly skips to the next song on list.

Here are some of the steps that I have taken to isolate the problem.

* The songs play fine in iTunes on my computer

* The source file on the local disk is not corrupted in anyway

* When I sync the song to the iPod and navigate to the song on the iPod when "disk use" is enabled I can play the song without any issues using QuickTime, Windows Media Player and Zune.

To further troubleshoot I would want to start poking into the iPod meta data files. I guess my question is why does the iPod software want to skip these particular songs. The stock answer appears to be that this is a hardware problem, altough from what I can tell so far that doesn't add up.

Has anyone else observed similar behavior? or has ideas about how to troubleshoot more I would love ot hear from you.

Windows, Windows XP Pro, Windows 2003 Server

Posted on Jul 6, 2011 11:38 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 17, 2011 9:46 PM in response to MarkWH

I have the same issue. Same songs on my wifes ipod and mine. I believe it started happening after the library was updated after the latest itunes update. I have 10.3.1.55

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

273,115 points

Jul 17, 2011 11:41 PM in response to MarkWH

Skipping songs

The iPod seems to fail to play all of the occasional track that iTunes, and indeed other PMPs, are happy to play. There is probably some minor technical error in the internal structure of the file which is normally ignored by other playback software but causes the Classic to bail out.

If you use Windows you may like to try scanning the files with MP3Validator which can find & fix some internal MP3 errors.

Some users have also suggested that completely removing all id3 tags and then replacing the information can be a solution. This can be achieved in iTunes by selecting an affected track, right/control clicking and using the option Convert id3 tags> None. Since some files may mistakenly have more than one tag you may need to repeat this action. Once you have confirmed that no tag is present you can replace the tag information using Convert id3 tags > V2.3 (I believe it is recommended to avoid using V2.4).

Personally I have found files for which these solutions don't work. In this case the workaround is either to re-rip the tracks or get iTunes to re-encode the file, e.g.convert AAC to MP3 or vice versa and sync the newly encoded file to the iPod instead. Because transcoding will cause a loss of fidelity you should keep your original file so that if a future iPod firmware resolves this issue you can put your original files back onto the iPod.

tt2

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Answer 3

Jul 26, 2011 5:10 PM in response to williamfromsouthfield

I ended up removing the tags. Deleted mp3s from iTunes then re-adding them.

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Answer 4

MarkWH Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 14, 2011 6:25 PM in response to MarkWH

turingtest2: The suggestion to use MP3 Validator worked perfectly for me.

http://mp3val.sourceforge.net/

I fixed my entrie music library (close to 1500 songs were horked).. After I used iTunes to update the album artwork another 20 songs became damaged. So something is going on when iTunes updates the tags that corrupts the files.

mp3Validator worked great for me!

Apple... Please look into this issue... Re-ripping 1500 songs is not a valid option especially since these songs work on other players!

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