iPod Apple Lossless skips on my iPod

[kurdt_the_goat]

I recently converted a few CD's to Apple Lossless and whilst they play perfectly fine on my iMac, they exhibit some strange problems when played on my 3G iPod. I've noticed:
1) Song will have a very brief pause with no sound, usually within the first 10 seconds of the song.
2) Song will play for about 5 seconds and then skip to the second song.

The weird thing is, after skipping to the next song, if i press back to the song that was skipped, it will play perfectly fine. And sometimes the song that skipped on a previous album listen, works fine the next time.
I assumed this was a buffering problem and hopefully isolated to my older model iPod.

But I want to upgrade to 5G iPod, and unfortunately read a few occurances of this problem on the Apple support forums, so i wanted to get opinions from users here as well....

Has anyone experienced problems with Apple Lossless playback on their iPods?

 

[mad jew]

I had no troubles on my 4G iPod and I have none on my current nano either. Just out of interest, how large are the song files?

 

[kurdt_the_goat]

30MB, weird thing is 2 songs later there's a 40MB one that played fine (at least it did last time i listened!)

 

[triobot]

That sorta thing happened to me when i put a load of tracks on my ipod.

Try playing the song before and allow the track to play into it... Something to do with the cache?

 

[mad jew]

Don't hold me to this and I can't remember where I read it, but I think the problem lessens if you have more free space on your iPod. Personally, I can't see how having the free space would help though. It's not like the iPod utilises paging files, does it? Anyway, is your iPod full?

 

[kurdt_the_goat]

It is very close to full, that is a good point. For now i've just converted my CD's again to 320 AAC and the difference for me is marginal if any so that'll do

Thanks for the help anyway!