Persistent playback problem

[Jacko]

I have a 30gb pod running on XP and use MC9 as my primary interface tool.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the display would freeze during playback. Typically, after five or six seconds, the display freezes and stays that way until the song reaches 44 or 45 seconds. Then the unit frees-up and I hear the hard drive spin for a second. During this freeze-out, none of the buttons are responsive, but the song continues playing. When the unit comes back to life the button inputs execute like they are cached.

I ran some tests at home: restored the pod using the 2.01 updater, reinitialized using MC9 and loaded a single album. Same thing.

So I sent it back to Apple. It seems all they did was run the updater and send it back.

Anyone heard of this before? I didn't see any posts in the forums/archives.

Thanks...

[Mezzanine]

I had something very similar which turned out to be due to APETags (Tags at the end of the mp3) that were generated by MP3Gain.

http://ipodlounge.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6258

[Jacko]

Wow, excellent. Thanks.

Maybe I should bounce this to Adam: I've been using MC9 exclusively, could it be the culprit?

[ashawley]

I don't think so. They adhere very strictly to the id3 tagging standards.

I did have something similar happen. The iPod would just freeze at the end of a song. Happened a couple of times. Since I did a Restore I haven't had the problem again.

I really think that the iPod can stand a fresh restore at least once a month. For me that keeps things clean and all. It's just a good idea for housekeeping and making sure the iPod database isn't corrupted in any way.

Adam

[Jacko]

Well I've been doing a bunch of restores lately as I've been playing with MC9.1.250 builds (ratings, playcounts, last played!!).

I called Apple today, and they havn't heard of the issue at all. I'm not convinced that mp3gain is the issue as I've never used it on my files, but I downloaded and mp3 checker tool which I'll run on my library tonight.

Also tonight I'll rerip an album in MC9 and upload the fresh files for testing.

As much as I love this thing, I sure have to work on it a bunch!

Thanks

[Jacko]

I seem to have made some progress overnight.

I started with a fresh restore and an MC9 initialization. Then I synched up one album, just one, and tested. The pod seemed okay. I then synced up one artist (three albums) and restested -- again everything seemed peachy.

I reinitialized in MC9 and uploaded my master-smartlist (MC9ers will know what I mean), and had the same problem. So I added a rule to my master smartlist which excluded the last 100 tracks ripped in a desparate attempt narrow the field of possible file corruption -- and I got lucky.

Everything seems to working fine this morning. Now I have to figure out what data is causing the issue. This weekend I will wipe the pod, and add just the last 100 tracks, confirm the problem, and then exclude data until I resolve the issue.

Thanks for the help, guys.

[ashawley]

Nice bit of sleuthness there Jacko....

I'm going to move this to the Windows>iPod Problems board as it appears to have become platform specific.

Adam