Mystery of why itunes won't play certain songs - quicktime plays them fine

symptoms:
most of my songs play normally.
the songs that don't play do show up normally in itunes playlist. when i try to play them, however, itunes skips over them immediately and moves on to the next file in the playlist.
this is not a standard "file not found"-type of error. no error message appears. the songs do NOT get a little grey exclamation on them afterwards.
after being skipped, the last played date and play count of the song file is updated in my library as though itunes thinks it played the song normally.
if right-click on the song in itunes and say "show sound file", the file is visible in the finder. if i view a preview in the finder, i CAN PLAY THE FILE FROM THE FINDER PREVIEW window, which makes this whole situation very odd.
i can also open the files and play them in quicktime player.app. they play fine.
the songs in question seem to be mostly old (~5 yrs) files that were encoded in a very old version of itunes (before it was called itunes) called soundjam. still i am pretty sure they are valid mp3 files. i'm quite sure that i have played them with itunes in the past, though i am not sure how long it has been since i last played them - perhaps a few years.
somehow it appears that the standard quicktime player for mp3 files is perfectly happy with this files, yet there is something about them that itunes does not like.
the files have relatively low bitrates (they are digitized versions of old cassette tapes). at least some of them (perhaps all) show in itunes as being encoded with SoundJam 2.6.2, and having variable bit rate.
i am using the latest version of itunes on mac os 10.4.6.
any suggestions?

so i think you understand that i was upset to find out that they had become unplayable/unconvertable in itunes.
Yes, I do understand. I have a few recordings of family members who died a few decades ago. They're still on tape and I want to digitize them before the magnetic particles "all point to the magnetic poles again".
I'm still in doubt in which format to store them however.
I digitized most of my old vinyl to AIFF and then converted them to Apple Lossless to save HD space.
The costs of large capacity disks have decreased over the years, so I'm thinking to leave the digitized recordings in AIFF format.
This format looks to last for at least a few decades (I hope).
I remember when old data on some type of punchcards (is this correct English?) had to be converted to go in the computer age.
The machines to read them already had been demolished, so they had to build a new one :/
M

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