160gb classic crashes when selecting specific album

Question

Infuriatingly my ipod's decided to crash whenever I try to pick a certain album. One of a few things will happen; the ipod will straight up freeze on the song list for that album, each song will be 'played' in the album (by which I mean each will last 0 seconds before skipping onto the next song which also has no content and so on), or the track will stay on zero seconds and then also nothing else will play until I reset the **** thing. I've tried restoring it already and I've got the most up to date software accoridng to itunes. Said album also plays perfectly fine in itunes, and indeed has done on this ipod previously.

Answer 1

*Skipping songs*
The iPod seems to fail to play all of the occasional track that iTunes, and indeed other PMPs, are happy to play. There is probably some minor technical error in the internal structure of the file which is normally ignored by other playback software but causes the Classic to bail out. Usually this just skips the song but occasionaly the iPod can lock up or reset.
You may like to try scanning the files with MP3 Validator which can find & fix some internal MP3 errors.
Some users have also suggested that completely removing all id3 tags and then replacing the information can be a solution. This can be achieved in iTunes by selecting an affected track, right/option clicking and using the option Convert id3 tags > None. Since some files may mistakenly have more than one tag you may need to repeat this action. Once you have confirmed that no tag is present you can replace the tag information using Convert id3 tags > V2.3 (I believe it is recommended to avoid using V2.4).
Personally I've have found files for which these solutions don't work. In this case the workaround is either to re-rip the tracks or get iTunes to re-encode the file, e.g. convert AAC to MP3 or vice versa and sync the newly encoded file to the iPod instead. Because transcoding will cause a loss of fidelity you should keep your original file so that if a future iPod firmware resolves this issue you can put your original files back onto the iPod.
tt2