ipod or itunes? Problems! Help!!

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coreysmale

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Alright, I've googled multiple searches and searched through the boards throroughly and have still not found an answer. So here's my dillema...

I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 and 4G 20GB Ipod with click wheel. I'm running XP with USB 1.1. Everything has been working well for the 3-4 months I have had but recently I've ran into a problem.

The other night, after using my Ipod on the campus computer to do my web radio show, my ipod started acting up. On the way home I would listen to a song, get about 10 seconds into it and it would either freeze, or just skip to the next track.

I have ran ipod updater and cleared it completely and updated it to the current update. I even re-installed itunes. So now when I drag and drop from my library to itunes, I almost have to do album by album and watch them so they dont freeze. I use to able to select, drag and drop 250-300 songs at a time and leave the computer alone while it added them all to my Ipod. I would come back it would be done and everything would play great.

Now, after the 20-25th song, iTunes begins to freeze and just stops adding songs and the apple logo appears as if it's done. It's almost as if it timed out. When I play the added songs on my iPod I will only get about half of them and they usually only work for a few seconds, with the exception of the first songs added.

I know that they are not corrupted files as they worked before. I'm sort of freaking out as I'm going on a trip tomorrow and want to be able to listen to my music without being frustrated out of my mind. I had read it could be a firewall problem? I have windows firewall off with Norton as my firewall.

Any advice or help would be MUUUCH appreciated!

Thanks.
-Corey Smale
 
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badmojo

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Sound to me like the internal drive is failing or has failed. Have you ever dropped it?
 
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I had a problem like that. It would play some of the song, then freeze and I would have to reset it. It sucked. I restored it and it wasn't so bad. Then I tried to use it on my Mac and it works fine now, from what I've seen. Even though I haven't used it much. But it's good. Just restore it. It's a quick painless process.
 
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coreysmale said:
.....

I know that they are not corrupted files as they worked before. ...
That doesn't mean that they could not be corrupted now. Your description sounds like the HD could be failing.
More likely though, is that there is a caching problem with your iPod. What I mean is, if you just skip, skip, skip and skip til you hear a song you want to hear...you are really taxing the cache. The iPod's cache can hold about 30 MB. This means it can store roughly about 5-7 songs ahead. By doing this, the iPod's HD doesn't have to work as hard. If you constantly skip through your songs, this will cause the HD to work harder because the cache is being constantly being filled and dumped at a rapid pace, rather than playing out what has been stored. The end result of this is you will eventually encounter skipping. Now this could happen as a result of time or heavy use as well, even if you don't skip through tracks purposely.
Two things you can do to help prevent skipping:

1.)I would suggest setting up playlists if you haven't already. So set up a playlist and let it play. Don't skip through the list or you will run into the same caching problems.

2.)Make sure you compress your song files. I would recommend the AAC format at around 128/kbs. This way you can fit more songs into the cache and leave less work for the HD to do.


As far as the songs that are already skipping, the files may be damaged now. You may want to restore the iPod to factory settings and then reload the music from a uncorrupted file.

Restoring iPod to Factory Settings
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The same thing happened to my 2G mini a while ago. I sent it to apple and they sent me back a new one. I think they said it was hd failure.
 

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