iPod Songs play in iTunes but not on iPod

[richardrj]

I downloaded an album (legally, from a reputable source). The songs play fine in iTunes on my Mac, but the problems begin when I transfer them to my iPod. They don't play at all, in fact – the iPod quickly skips through every song and then stops. Then I encounter further problems when I try and connect my iPod to the Mac after I've added these songs. The iPod doesn't show up in the Finder or in iTunes, and the iPod screen doesn't change to "Do not disconnect". The solution I've found is to disconnect the iPod, reset it in disk mode and reconnect it to the Mac - the iPod then shows up in the Finder and iTunes. When I delete the offending songs, all is well again.

So my question is, what is going wrong here? Are the song files corrupted in some way, or is it a fault with my iPod? If the song files are corrupted, how come they play fine in iTunes on the desktop? If it's a problem with my iPod's hard disk, how come it doesn't exhibit this behaviour with any other songs? Many thanks.

 

[MasterNile]

what format are the songs in?

 

[richardrj]

Sorry, I should have said - mp3. And I'm using an iPod Classic and an iMac running OS 10.4 and the latest version of iTunes installed, if that's any help.

 

[MasterNile]

have you tried putting them into .m4a?

 

[richardrj]

That's the same thing as AAC, right? (Sorry, I'm not a techie as you can probably guess.) No, I haven't tried that but will do so.

But even if that works I still don't understand why I would need to do it when this iPod plays hundreds of mp3 files without a problem.

 

[MasterNile]

yeah that would be the same as AAC, and I'm not sure why that would work, I just know when I first converted all my cds a lot of the songs would skip most of the song, I then converted them to AAC and never had the problem again