Incomplete song play: Do replacement iPods do better?

Question

I've had my iPod for less than two months. From the beginning I've had the problem of some songs not playing completely. If a particular song ends early, it will always end at the same point. For some songs they play for a few seconds or several seconds and then the iPod begins to play the next track in the list. For other songs they will play until near the end before jumping to the next track. Others terminate somewhere in the middle of what should play.
When songs "skip," if I go back to the song and scrub a significant amount past the point where it abruptly ends, the remainder of the song will play, indicating that most of, if not all of, the song file is present on the drive. For example, one song that abruptly ended yesterday lasts 5:16, but after 1:25 the iPod ends the song and plays the next track. I scrubbed to 1:30, and the iPod began playing the next track. But after I went back and scrubbed further, to 2:00, the remainder of the song played -- all of the way to 5:16.
I thought the problem was related to disk fragmentation, but no one seems to acknowledge that possibility. Optimizing my music storage drive and restoring the iPod seems to help most of the songs that once skipped, but then I continue to encounter additional "incomplete" songs as I listen to more of my collection. Having the backlight always on makes no difference. Having Genius on or off makes no difference. I even tried converting my ID3 tags and restoring, but I'm still encountering songs which don't play completely, and it's maddening and frustrating. When I perform a restore, most of the songs that failed prior to the restore will play normally, but it's very inconvenient to go through the process -- especially when it won't work completely.
I've gone through the 5Rs and I've restored the iPod several times.
So my question is this: For those who've experienced this problem and received replacements from Apple, have you finally gotten a unit which did not have this issue? (I know that in some older posts, users have complained that they've gotten a replacement unit -- or sometimes more than one -- that still had the same problem.)
Even though my collection is relatively small (only 14 gb, 3300 songs), it's time-consuming to listen to the entire collection to try to identify songs to re-encode from the CD, and I don't want to waste any more time, in case I have to send in several units for replacement while my warranty is still good. Besides, there doesn't seem to be any guarantee that songs that once played fine won't eventually start skipping. Today I even had a song purchased from the iTunes Music Store end halfway through the song -- how do I replace that?
Apple used to make the premier portable digital music jukebox device. What happened?

Answer 1

Here are my thoughts...
*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.
Some users have suggested that completely removing all id3 tags and then replacing the information is often 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 this solution doesn'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 file back onto the iPod.
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With this in mind I think it's a firmware issue rather than somthing affecting your particular iPod alone. Therefore a replacement is most likely to have exactly the same issue with the same tracks. One thing you could try is to collect a couple of tracks that you know fail and ask a friend with an iPod to put them on theirs to see if the fault is consistent.
Whan I come across any problem tracks or spot an issue like missing artwork I use the select button on the iPod to go to the rating screen and give the track a rating of one. I then have a smart playlist in my iTunes that shows tracks with a rating of one so that I'm reminded of which tracks I need to fix.
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