Sound Just Started Cracking?

Hey Guys..
Its weird how ive managed to get 2 sound problems on 2 different apple products within 2 days

1) Just working as usual on my Macbook Pro, and I decide to throw some music on, cure the boredom.. When I do however, the track sounds like its been physically scratched (however it is a digital file) so I then thought some sort of corruption or a bad file..

However, all sound coming from my Mac is cracking, and skipping in some instances. Im going to take it into the Apple Store tonight.. I got the protection plan so there shouldnt be any discrepancy, but im also having big trouble with my battery, because its not holding a charge. Running out waay too quickly.

2) My iPod seems to only play music out of the right earphone.. Tried different ear phones with my iPod, and the same earphones on someone elses player, the fault is definitely with the iPod.

Gah.. Usually the products are so amaaaazing

If anyone has any recommendations on what these problems may be caused by, it could well save me time in the apple shop.

Cheers,
Lewwy.

post what they say after your visit, just curious to see what would cause those problems, especially with the laptop.

I've noticed that playing audio through external speakers in iTunes will produce "skipping" if the iTunes volume is up full (I thought my entire media collection/drive was corrupted for awhile or my speakers had blown before I finally figured it out!) . Taking it down a little bit and using the volume control on the speakers cured this. I don't know if this is common, but my flatmate said he encountered the same problem with iTunes on his Windows laptop. If it's also happening for system sounds too though, it's probably a hardware issue. You could try playing with Audio MIDI Setup (/Applications/Utilities/) and see if that does anything (that fixed some issues I was having with an external audio device I had some time ago).

As for the iPod, unless you've somehow encoded all your files with only right-channel audio (which is something you'd pick up pretty quickly when playing them through iTunes and so very unlikely), then it probably is a hardware fault.

Thank very much Levi, just applied your suggestion and it sorted my skipping issues out.