Can we get some progress regarding incomplete song play? PLEASE READ

Question

I'm rather desperate to be rid of songs ending early (playing incompletely, skipping, jumping, cutting off, or whatever terminology you want to use). I'm making this post to try to consolidate everyone's complaints and to possibly alert Apple to the issue or bug so that they'll fix it. Hopefully an Apple Host will read this thread.
We've often surmised that the faulty play was because of a firmware issue. After having spent time this evening examining the problem between my iPod and my computer, I'm beginning to believe it's completely a hardware issue -- specifically pertaining to the 1.8 inch hard drive inside the iPod Classic.
Using [aacConverter|http://conglomco.org/aac>, I converted "Three Day Weekend" (which ends at 0:29 on my iPod despite being 4:48 in length), from the external hard drive on which I store my music. That decoded the m4a into aif. Then, using [Audacity|http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity], I examined the uncompressed file. It looked like this:
!http://home.earthlink.net/~terrancehicks/images/Harddrive_filepic-.jpeg!
As you can see, there's nothing wrong with the file. I played it, and there was nothing wrong -- not even at the 0:29 mark. Then I used [iPodRip|http://ipodrip.com/download> to import files directly from my iPod. After repeating the above process -- aacConverter & Audacity -- I examined the copy of "Three Day Weekend" which is on my iPod. It looked like this:
!http://home.earthlink.net/~terrancehicks/images/CorruptiPod_filepic-.jpeg!
In the 30th second, the wave drops off into some weird pulses for about 30 seconds, after which the audio sounds like the music I'd imported from the CD.
Apparently, something is happening to the file when it is transferred to the iPod's hard drive. Because removing the music and replacing it tends to fix the problem, my thought is that the hard drive has bad sectors that corrupt the data iTunes attempts to put there. I've only examined the waveform of a couple of the broken songs I imported from my iPod (iPodRip is shareware and limits the number of songs one can "rip" from the iPod without buying it), but there appears to be a pattern to the corruption -- around 30 seconds.
However, I have identified three iTunes Store songs with a break, and though I can't convert them or view their waveform, I can listen to them (with QuickTime Player), and their pulses sound different from those of the unprotected files.
So, given this information, can anyone figure out what's going on? (Reimporting songs is unnecessary, but users with much more music would have a reduced chance of having a place to put all of their music without having it riddled with bad sectors, if that's what they are.)

Answer 1

I see two possibilities. The first is that your problem isn't the same as mine. The second is that your method of playing a song from your iPod with iTunes on your computer isn't the same as mine.
I tested the aforementioned song, "Three Day Weekend," from the iPod's drive through iTunes while the iPod was connected to my computer, and once the song reached 0:29, it jumped to the next track, just as when playing the iPod standalone.
The files on your computer hard drive are not technically the same as the files on your iPod. The files on the iPod are clones of the files on your computer (or external drive). As I demonstrated in the OP, a broken file from my iPod has a chunk of data that's different from the original file. I did some more investigating today. Using TextEdit and BBEdit, I examined the "text" of the good file and the corrupt iPod file side by side. They were nearly identical. BBEdit located two differences. The corrupt file was missing 1366 lines of data compared to the good file, and the corrupt file had one line with a whole lot of empty space inserted in the middle of the data that appeared on a line with an otherwise similar appearance on the good file. In the near future I'll upload some screenshots and post links so that anyone can get a closer look at what I'm talking about. (I don't know what it all means.)
In order to check "Three Day Weekend" from my iPod in iTunes, I had to check the button next to "Manually manage music..." Then I expanded my iPod playlists by clicking on the triangle next to the icon of my iPod under DEVICES (it may help if you collapse your regular PLAYLISTS by clicking the triangle next to "PLAYLISTS" so that you won't mistakenly play one of the files from your hard drive). Then I went to my playlist where I track my broken songs and double-clicked on "Three Day Weekend." As I said, it exhibited the same behavior as on my iPod standalone. Mugsy, if you've followed that procedure and had your songs play fine, then your problem is different from mine.
If your problem is like mine but FooBar puts your music on the iPod, then it's not the SAME music that was faulty. The music on your hard drive is fine, but something's happening to it when iTunes transfers the music to the iPod. Because FooBar's transfer doesn't produce "skips," it's unlikely the hard drive has bad sectors. Rather, iTunes is corrupting the files during transfer. Or is it a combination of factors? Some posters have been saying they've been experiencing similar problems since some version of iTunes 7! What could be causing Apple's premier cross-platform software to be mucking up data during transfer? You would think they would want to fix it.