iPod Oddity

This afternoon, I did something I do periodically: fixed my pending correction songs on my iPod. These are songs that, when I listen to them on the iPod, have some sort of problem: ripping artifacts such as skipping or segments of other songs, or (for LP rips), skips or repeats. I one-star () the song, and later go back and fix the track. Sometimes I correct these by reripping the CD after cleaning it, but for some, it is just easier to use the old CD player and record them analog fashion, for there seems to be more tolerance in the old player. (Note: This is a good thing to remember when you buy a used CD that “plays perfectly”, but never rips right in your computer CD reader.)

One of the problematic tracks today was the last track on the Nashville Cast Recording of “Always, Patsy Cline”. This album has had problems before, so I just went to the CD player. The song played fine on the player, and had no problems in the .WAV file. I loaded the file into iTunes, and convered it to AAC (.m4a), and it played fine in iTunes. When I played it on the iPod, however, it had odd skips (just like the replaced version). I went back and confirmed that there were no problems with the .wav and the .m4a in iTunes. They played just fine. So I tried an experiment: I brought the .wav file up in Roxio Sound Editor, and saved it as a .mp3. I put that on the iPod instead of the .m4a. When I tested the iPod playback, it was just fine.

It appears the iPod uses a different playback approach than iTunes (which uses Quicktime). I’ve had unplayable podcasts in the past: when I would start to play the .mp3, they would immediately exit. I convert the .mp3 to .m4a, and they play just fine. This time, it was the opposite approach: saving the song as .mp3 instead of .m4a. In any case, I’m guessing Apple’s software has a bug somewhere that is treating a particular frequency with some out of bounds pointer and going crazy. Has anyone else run into this oddity?

P.S.: For those who are curious how I do things. I run the audio out (that it, the output that one would nominally run into a cassette deck) from my sound system (which includes support for a real phonograph) into the line in on my computer (I have a ground isolation loop in this line to eliminate the hum from the two rooms being on different circuits). I record from the line in using Roxio Media Creator v7.5, the software to “Convert LPs and Tapes to CD”. This leaves me with a large WAV file. Within the converter, I divide it into tracks. I used to then burn those tracks to CD, but now I just save them as .WAV files. I import the .WAV files into iTune, and (after correcting the metadata) convert them to AAC. I then delete the original WAV and the problematic M4A file, and correct the album art. I guess I could save the files as MP3 from Roxio instead of WAV, but for some reason I prefer to let iTunes convert things.