It's Not "Just Working"

October 29, 2006 2:46 AM

My iPod freezes up on me whenever I play certain files.

Help! My 60 gig 5G iPod plays most songs/audiobooks/podcasts/movies fine, but whenever I try to play one of my This American Life episodes (downloaded via wget, not from the podcast feed or Audible), the iPod freezes up, displays the apple logo for about 2 minutes, then returns to the main menu.

As far as I can tell, this only happens with TAL episodes, which are 64 kbps mpeg files. The thing is brand new - the Apple Store just replaced my old one due to an (unrelated) problem.

So far I've tried a restore, and it hasn't done any good. I'm on the latest firmware update. I'm going to set up another restore right now before I go to bed and see what happens tomorrow, but I'm not keeping my hopes up...

posted by rossination to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Do a factory restore. Only sync up with the TAL episode (put the iPod into manual mode). Try playing the track. If the iPod goes loopy, it's probably a bad track.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:55 AM on October 29, 2006

Best answer: The reason why you're having the problem describe is precisely because you are running the "latest firmware update".

Don't bother wasting your time with a factory restore. The (interim) solution to the problem is simply turning off the EQ on your iPod. The new iPod firmware completely screwed up a whole bunch of things, one of which is playback of mono mp3s
posted by melorama at 3:36 AM on October 29, 2006

Its the filenames. Some kind of character in (some of) them freaks apple out. Simply renaming them didn't solve the problem, but wget -O [explicit filename] from the get-go works.
posted by 31d1 at 6:22 AM on October 29, 2006

I had this problem with an audio book (ripped as just MP3) and my problem disapeared after I removed the files and resynced them with my ipod.
posted by sablazo at 8:19 AM on October 29, 2006

Best answer: turning off the EQ is, as Melorama said, the solution for now.
posted by DragonBoy at 9:55 AM on October 29, 2006

Same issue here. Another fix is adding .1s to the start time clipping -.1s off the end. It seems to fix most of the crashing podcasts for me. (Before I knew about the fix, I took my iPod to one of the local Apple stores -- they swapped it out with a new one.)
posted by nathan_teske at 10:32 AM on October 29, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks, Melorama and Dragonboy - that did it. I didn't think it had to do with firmware because the previous iPod had the latest firmware as well, but maybe the EQ wasn't on.
posted by rossination at 11:51 AM on October 29, 2006

Is it possible to roll back firmware upgrades without doing a factory restore?
posted by geronimo's folly at 6:02 PM on October 29, 2006

I just wanted to say that this question just blew my mind, because I've been having the EXACT same problem, manifested in This American Life mp3s and all.

I'm going to try the equalizer thing, hope it works!
posted by sarahsynonymous at 8:01 PM on October 30, 2006