IPod Tagged ALAC Crashes

[Mogs48]

For the last 6 months, Rockbox has done an excellent job with handling my +5000 playlist of ALAC files (converted from WAV to save space) on an old IPod 5th Gen. I recently added tags to organize the files. Whenever I play any file, it runs from a few seconds to minutes and experiences a Data Abort crash. The crash code and time of crash varies depending on the filed played.

Does Rockbox usually have issues playing ALAC files with tags? Or other files formats containing tags? I have tested the extent of this by creating new ALAC, MP3, and FLAC files with tags. Either the file played crashes immediately, crashes after running, or skips to the next song.

At this point, I suspect it has something to do with either the tag format, or the software I am using that adds tags. I am using MusicBrainz Pickard to encode ID3v2, 2.3 tags with UTF-16 encoding. Can anyone suggest potential software or encoding settings that will produce tagged music files that will not crash when played?

[saratoga]

MP4 files can't have ID3v2 tags, so if you put those on your files, the decoder probably won't be able to understand them.  Any reason you don't use the standard MP4 metadata?