iPod keeps derailing

October 8, 2007 10:12 AM

My old iPod is behaving badly. Is there something wrong with it or something wrong with the tracks I'm trying to play?

I have a 40GB 3G iPod (the kind with the four touch-sensitive buttons above the wheel). The battery is already giving out--I know that much. But something weird is going on with a number of tracks on two albums I purchased from the iTunes store recently. That is, the iPod skips over those tracks. I'm not set to shuffle, I'm not in a playlist with those tracks missing.

Curiously, I was able to play the tracks in iTunes through my iPod (rather than using the iTunes library) so I'm inclined to think there's nothing wrong with the tracks that would make the iPod want to skip them.

What gives? Is this a common problem with aging iPods? I'm planning to upgrade eventually but, dammit, the tracks the iPod is skipping are good ones.

posted by emelenjr to technology (5 comments total)

Your iPod hard drive is dying. It's happened to me several times. Sorry for your loss.
posted by Optamystic at 10:15 AM on October 8, 2007

ditto on the dying hard drive, been there, done that.

if you don't want to drop the cash for a new ipod, my suggestion is to spring for apple's $60-70 battery replacement. it'll get you a brand-new (refurbed) one identical to your current model.
posted by noloveforned at 10:25 AM on October 8, 2007

A new battery won't save a dying hard drive. Eventually, yes, the drives do wear out on those. Have you tried a full reset? That may help. Also, it's conceivable that you can run various disk utilities (defrag on Windows, Disk Utility/DiskWarrior on Mac) on the drive if you put it in Disk Mode. YMMV- I'm just conjecturing, seek out people who have tried this before doing it.

Tangential question- I wonder if the growth of pod-/videocasting isn't exacerbating the problem with drive-based players, since you're writing much more often to the drive. Does this make sense, or is it still not enough (say ~10 changes/sync) to make a real difference in wear and tear?
posted by mkultra at 10:58 AM on October 8, 2007

a new battery won't save the ipod, but apple's battery replacement service doesn't actually replace the battery. they send you a "new" (aka refurbished) unit with a new hard drive, as i previously mentioned.
posted by noloveforned at 11:06 AM on October 8, 2007

My 4G, 20Gb, iPod has done the same thing. To solve it, what I had to do was to set the iPod to manually manage the music, then delete the tracks off my iPod that it was skipping, and then put them back onto my iPod through iTunes. This seemed to fix my issue.
posted by fallenposters at 5:36 AM on October 9, 2007