My recent apple experience.

S

Sage Osaka

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 28, 2006
Messages
422
Ok, I'll start with the fact that i have another post on this forum somewhere down the line, with my problem of songs not playing on my iPod. Certain songs, (a lot of them) i will try to play, and as i start them i feel a distinct vibration and hear clicks from the hard drive, then, nothing. The song wont play, and it will be stuck on 0:00.

So, I called up apple and went through all the steps to get them to send me a box to send in to them to have a look at it. Well, i send it in and a week or so later i receive it back with some papers and stuff, with a note that said: "no problems detected." Shit... so take it out of the box, re import all my songs back onto my ipod, and what do you know, i have the same exact problem.

I decide to drive to San Francisco (the closest apple store) which is about an hour and a half drive. I arrive and head upstairs at the Genius bar (actual name, btw) and the guy takes my ipod, wipes everything off it, loads 1 single song and after sees it playing, tells me my ipod is just fine. Though he did tell me that ripping my cds using windows media player puts drm on every file and guesses that that is why half of my songs aren't playing, even though i made sure to mention that the same exact files were used on various other ipods including the same exact model of my own (80 gb) and played fine.

So, am i screwed here? or is there some problem that im not going about in the correct way? Thanks for listening to my rant/story, and i would greatly appreciate any help anyone has to offer, thanks in advance.
 
What model iPod is it? (drive size, generation)

Try re-ripping a CD or two using CDEX and load it on your iPod. A click from the hard drive doesn't necessarily mean it is failing, it simply means it's a disk read error. DRM can be the culprit here but that sound weird that it works on other iPod and not yours.

Maybe to test if you hard drive has bad sectors you should download a bunch of podcasts, load them all up and try to play them.

Keep us informed of the situation.
 
Well i think i mentioned that its an 80gb ipod, but forgot to mention that its a 5.5 generation ipod video.

So is CDEX like an alternative to iTunes? if so, and if it's free, i think i will welcome it with open arms. But the only problem i have is that a lot of my cds on my computer were ripped with windows media player then given back to the owner, so i guess i just wont be able to have those cds back.

Whats this about bad sectors? I've read up a little about sectors and such, and i ran my ipod through the diagnostics mode and saw a few things about it, could this also maybe help?

Thanks for the hasty response, ill keep everyone informed of the situation, any other feedback is welcome.

Edit: Are there any programs that i would able to use to somehow pass my music through basically untouched but remove the drm somehow?
 
sorry but blaming windows media player is lame. It does not impart DRM unless setup to do so. Even then that symptom you experience is exactly the one I had before two of my iPods died.

Both played the songs that suddenly stopped playing and both went into that harddrive stutter. One lasted most of a year but I had to reload it a few times... the other was gone within days of acting up.

I'm on my third and last, if this one goes then I will wait till flash versions are 20gb or better
 
Yeah i thought it was lame that he was blaming windows media player, especially after i told him the same exact songs that werent playing on my ipod played on other ipods just fine. What really sucks, is that this ipod is brand new and is doing this right out of the box.
 
remove WMP from the equation just to be safe, and use iTunes to rip the CD (or CDEX as suggested)

Have you tried reformatting and reinstalling the ipod's software?


What were the "few things you saw" about bad sectors in diag mode? Did it find any?
Honestly if the built in ipod diagnostics found bad sectors then the apple repair dept. SHOULD have noticed that... that would really be an oversight on their part.
 
Yeah I'm going to try to import my whole library again, see exactly which files dont play, and then try to re-rip them using itunes or cdex. The problem is, some of my cds were ripped and then I lost track of some of them, so would there be any way to somehow pass my files through some program to sort of "convert" them without actually changing anything about the file, other than sort of re-writing it? Just in case maybe i had a bad version of wmp at the time or something.

And what i meant about the sectors was i saw a few things about Retracts and Reallocs, i'm not too sure what they are about, but it also says i have 0 pending sectors, i also dont know what that means.

But what i initially meant was that i read somewhere that this sort of problem could be something to do with bad sectors, how would i go about checking to see if thats the problem, and eventually fix it if it is?

I'll keep you guys posted, thanks for the help.

Edit: to answer KaosDG's question, I've reformatted and reinstalled the firmware 5+ times, so i think i can say that ive ruled a bad firmware install out.
 
This happened to me too, songs would get "stuck" it seemed... at 0m0s. If I manually scrolled through them I could hear about .5s of audio after I stopped scrolling (and the iPod seeked the position) and then it would lock up again.

Any files that I ripped on windows (regardless of the program, other than iTunes) wouldn't play properly on my iPod Photo.

Any Mp3 file plays perfectly if it was ripped from iTunes (in windows too) or any other Mac program.

So, in short, iTunes worked for me on Windows... And any MP3 generating program on Mac worked fine.
 
Does anyone think that converting my mp3's just to a lower bitrate would fix the messed up rip? Because a lot of my mp3's i dont have the cd of anymore.
 
It is probably a problem with the codec. You can try converting the songs in iTunes to AAC and see what happens. Right-click a problematic song and select "convert selection to aac" then export that to your iPod.
 
Hmm, it seems that converting to aac works, but does this mean i should have to convert all my music to aac before exporting?

Edit: Why is it that the same file with a supposed codec incompatibility will work on one ipod and not another?
 
untitledip6.jpg


i'm assuming this means its up to date?
 
Yup, and I know 1.2.1 is the newest as I just updated my iPod as well ;)
 
You don't have to use AAC. Go to itunes / preferences / advanced / importing and switch "import using:" to mp3. Then you can set the bitrate, etc to whatever you want. (That's how I get to it on the Mac. If you have a PC, it is only slightly different.)

I don't know why it works on other iPods but not yours. There have been a lot of mp3 encoders over the years which have each gone through many versions. Some of the older ones may not be 100% supported by all players. If you have downloaded a lot of mp3 files over the years, it is likely that your library is a mishmash of files made by all sorts of different encoders. It is also possible that an ID3 tag editor may have corrupted the files or something along those lines. These explanations would cover differences between iPod models but not differences between iPods of the same exact model.

Sage Osaka said:
Hmm, it seems that converting to aac works, but does this mean i should have to convert all my music to aac before exporting?

Edit: Why is it that the same file with a supposed codec incompatibility will work on one ipod and not another?
Click to expand...
 
VladimirS said:
You don't have to use AAC. Go to itunes / preferences / advanced / importing and switch "import using:" to mp3. Then you can set the bitrate, etc to whatever you want. (That's how I get to it on the Mac. If you have a PC, it is only slightly different.)
Click to expand...

Hmm, this seems like a viable solution, will this work if i delete the library out of itunes, and then re add my whole library from My Music? Or does this only mean when im ripping off a cd?
 
How is your music stored on your computer? How many gigabytes is your library? Does your iTunes have a separate folder or does it also use "My Music"? Go to advanced settings and look for something like "copy music to itunes folder when importing." If this is checked, then iTunes is maintaining its own folder. But double-check to make sure.

Assuming you have enough space and that iTunes has its own folder separate from the master copies in My Music, this is what I'd do.

1. Go to iTunes, select all songs, and mass convert everything into the codec and bitrate of your choice.

2. Then, using explorer, go into your itunes music folder and delete all the original files. You'll probably have to sort by date or filetype. For instance, if all your original files were mp3 and you converted to aac, then just do a search for the mp3s in the itunes folder and trash those.

3. Then go to iTunes and remove ALL the songs from your library but without telling iTunes to delete the actual files.

4. At this point, you will have an empty iTunes catalog but the iTunes folder will be full of your converted files.

5. Drag the iTunes folder into iTunes to remake the catalog.

6. Sync your new catalog to the iPod.

I wouldn't reconvert your master MP3s as doing so will degrade their quality. The iPod Shuffle actually has an option that allows you to automatically convert files while importing but I don't know if they Video iPod has it too.


Sage Osaka said:
Hmm, this seems like a viable solution, will this work if i delete the library out of itunes, and then re add my whole library from My Music? Or does this only mean when im ripping off a cd?
Click to expand...
 
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