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I have an iPod Classic from 2007 (Generation 5.5, 80GB hard drive).

Something that I've been noticing happening more and more is that some songs will play just fine but then at some point they'll just stop. The little time counter will jump to where it appears there is two seconds left in the song. And it will just sit there for several seconds and then then proceed to the next song.

And what I've noticed is that it tends to happen consistently with the songs that are problematic.

I've searched all over to figure out what might be causing this but I haven't had much lock, possibly because the symptoms are so vague ("some songs cut off", etc.)

My music collection, which is always pretty much filling the device, is 100% MP3 from a wide variety of sources (ripped, bought from Napster, etc.) and everything plays fine in Winamp on my PC so it doesn't seem as if the files themselves are completely corrupted.

My guess is that there is something about the files that the iPod is choking on but I can't figure out what that might be. If I'm lucky it's some weird tagging quirk (i.e., can be fixed in the individual files) but I really just don't know, and it seems to be happening on an increasing number of files, including files that played just fine before. Sometimes an entire album or artist will consist of files that cut off.

If this is just some known issue, do the latest iPod Classics (Generation 6, 160GB hard drives) still have this issue? I'm almost hoping that this is a sign of a dying iPod so I can upgrade :)

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

The first thing to check is to see if iTunes has marked those specific songs to end early. Next, try re-encoding the song at a lower or different bitrate and syncing it to the device. Often a glitch in the file can cause iPods to skip to the next song, but the same binary file plays through on macs with better code for handling errors. Lastly, it could be error creeping into the filesystem structure on the iPod. Once you're sure you've backed up everything from the iPod, you can enter disk mode and use Disk Utility (on the mac - on Windows there are lots of disk formatting tools) to zero the drive. That will test the actual hard drive for errors and spare out any bad blocks.

enter image description here Feel free to edit this or comment if you find none of these helps narrow down the cause.

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Last night I tried some of the stuff suggested here: superuser.com/questions/327410/… using a particular mp3 I knew had issues, but even though the utilities told me that this mp3 had issues and it fixed them, the file still cuts off. The "end early" thing is not the issue either. I'm now wondering if it's the filesystem creep issue you mention - I'll investigate that tonight. I guess the fixed mp3 was going right back onto my hard drive where the "broken" one was so maybe that's why the issue stuck around. – Schnapple Jan 31 at 15:25
If you have a handful of songs that have the issue in exactly the same place and you can remove them and add them again to the iPod - FS issues are astronomically unlikely to be the root cause - repeatable ending is much more likely an issue in those encodings, but when all else fails, the filesystem gets blamed on the device or the computer. The other thing to try is upload that song for someone else with a similar iPod to check. That will rule out your device, HD, and filesystem in one step. – bmike♦ Jan 31 at 15:53
I would still give re-encoding the file a try. It will rule out the file being the issue. In almost all cases the loss in quality wont even be noticeable – OrangeBox Feb 4 at 4:19
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up vote 0 down vote

This happend to me in the past with the same model you have, though I dont think its neccessarly model specific.

The error is coming from a glitch in the music file, try converting the file to AAC and syncing the new file to your iPod, should fix the issue.

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Won't that result in fidelity loss? I'd rather not have to convert files. – Schnapple Jan 30 at 23:19
It depends on the original quality of the file, but strictly speaking: yes. You could convert it to a lossless format, or use an external program to convert the file to the same format & bit-rate. Unfortunately the issue resides in the ipod not being able to play a part of the song - the only way I can think of to get around this is to encode the song again (though it doesnt have to be to a different format) – OrangeBox Jan 31 at 0:20
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