Ipod video truncates randomly and skips/stutters on floyd songs during playback

[viikatemies]

I recently (a month ago) was finally able to update my ipod video 60GB to a recent version of rockbox. Previously, I was running a version almost exactly a year old (20061201 - before the required bootloader update) and had none of the issues below when playing back the same music using that old build.

After the update (last downloaded/installed 20071204), most songs play without issue. Unfortunately, during playback a (random?) song will abruptly stop (truncate) at some point within the song and move to the next song in the playlist. Sometimes if I stop and 'previous' back to the song that truncated, it will play completely and normally. There have also been occasions when attempting to replay the truncating song, it will continue to truncate the playback of that song. I have not noticed any pattern to either which songs truncate, or where within the song they truncate.

The other strange playback phenomenon that I'm experiencing is that every Pink Floyd song that I've noticed, and as far as I've noticed only Pink Floyd songs, will at various points within the songs skip or stutter forward and backward for a few seconds over a few second range of the song. This tends to happen a few time within each song.

To give a bit more context, all the music on this ipod are medium quality (~200-250 kbit) ogg vorbis files. There's ~30GB of music in total, played via a single playlist that has been shuffled. I'm using the brushed metal WPS, so I don't think I'm pegging the CPU.

Any ideas/suggestions would be most appreciated.

[Llorean]

Most times when people have experience parts of one song playing in another, or later parts of the song playing out of order, it's been the result of disk corruption. Have you tried to play the files that are actually on the player from a PC based player?

[Febs]

You might also try resetting your settings using the Manage Settings --> Reset Settings menu to see if you can replicate the problem using the default settings.  (Save the settings first in case there is anything that you want to return to.)

[viikatemies]

Thanks for the replies.

I tried playing one of the floyd songs directly from the ipod by using it as a usb drive and using mplayer to do the playing and it had the same playback problem. Deleting and reloading the song took care of that problem.

I also reset the settings to the default, and in fact I also deleted the entire .rockbox directory and put the build from yesterday on with no other modifications. After doing the above I still have songs that will truncate during playback. Heading Llorean's advice, I took note of one of the songs that truncated and when played back with mplayer via the ipod it appeared that it too was somehow corrupted. Again, deleting and reloading the song resolved the problem. So in the end, it looks like I'm having some sort of disk/file issue. Hopefully it's not a drive dying....

The odd thing to me is that I use rsync to maintain the files on the ipod, so I would have expected that rsync would notice the bad files and correct them.

Thanks again for your assistance, and thanks to everyone putting rockbox together.

[yapper]

You might try copying one of the 'bad' tracks (if you haven't fixed them all) from the iPod to your PC, and see if it still plays badly.

If it plays fine once copied to the PC, it might be a problem with (severe) disk fragmentation on the iPod.

[soap]

You might try copying one of the 'bad' tracks (if you haven't fixed them all) from the iPod to your PC, and see if it still plays badly.

If it plays fine once copied to the PC, it might be a problem with (severe) disk fragmentation on the iPod.

Disk fragmentation (severe even) would show itself as extended times to fill the buffer, not playback skips.  Rockbox loads encoded tracks into 28 or 60 megs of RAM (30 or 60/80GB) and thus once buffered fragmentation should not cause "feed" problems)