Music "Skipping" on Shuffle, anyone have this happen??

Just curious to know if anyone has had this issue...

I downloaded songs onto my shuffle. I noticed, during the middle of a song, there was 1-2 seconds of complete silence and than the song would resume.

I played the song on iTunes and discovered at that particular part of the song there was a small hiccup in the song. But the difference being, that iTunes wouldn't have 1-2 seconds of silence, just a very faint hiccup in the song. The CD's I copied were horribly scratched, so chances are the CD was scratched at that point.

My question is, why does the shuffle have 1-2 seconds of silence, and iTunes have a small faint hiccup?

Has anyone else noticed something similar to this?

Thanks,

VakeJ

p.s. This has only happened for about 2-3 songs from the same album

from apples site:
iPod's skip protection works because of its memory cache. The hard drive holds the songs from your iTunes music library, but when iPod plays your songs, it copies them from the hard drive into the memory cache, This means between four to seven average songs saved as MP3 or AAC files can fit into the cache at one time. When the cache is full, iPod's hard drive turns off. All the music you hear comes from the cache. When the songs in the cache have all been played, the hard drive turns back on and copies more songs to the cache.
Maximize skip protection

To get the maximum amount of time out iPod's skip protection, make sure your songs are encoded so their file sizes are small. The more songs iPod can preload into its memory cache, the longer the skip protection. For example: Importing songs as AAC at 128 kilobits per second (kbit/s) instead of at 192 kbit/s increases the amount of songs iPod can store in its cache.

Minimizing how often the hard drive turns on can also increase the amount of skip protection. By not pressing Fast-forward, iPod can play the songs that are already in the memory cache instead of loading new song from the hard drive.

also, are the songs mp3 or aiff, etc? how big are the files?o, battery life also affects the skip protection.

VakeJ is using a shuffle, which does not have a hard drive and thus no skip protection since it is not needed.

My guess is that the MP3 has a flaw due to the damage on the original CD that is causing a relatively large amount of processing. Check activity monitor on your Mac and see if you get a spike in CPU usage at the point of the hiccup. If you do then your best bet with the existing CD would be to try one of the scratch removers and re-rip the tracks. Alternatively you could re-rip from the MP3 but I would not reccomend it. The last alternative would be to edit the file to skip the bad segment using something like Audacity. That might work.

If CPU usage does not spike then i am not sure what is causing the problem. The above solutions are worth a try in any case.

if that is the case then he can LEGALLY DOWNLOAD it. and then just replace the scratched file with the downloaded...