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February 17, 2006

Got the replacement iPod (, )

by fluffy at 7:51 PM
So, the replacement for the iPod which refused to finish booting after syncing came today, and it has the same problem, so there must be something wrong with one of my mp3s. Rather than just arnt about it, though, I'm going to narrow the mp3 down so that I can send it to Apple so they can figure out how to handle it more gracefully.

2/18 01:00 If you want to solve this problem without writing an application, check out this handy guide.

Of course, this is a pretty tedious process, though with a refinement process I can try to make it a bit less aggravating - basically, I have a smart playlist called 'test' where I'll add and modify rules to pare things down, first based on the first letter of the album title, then on the second letter, and so on. (Of course for a first step I'm doing it on ones without an album title, and then will do that refinement on the song title.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that it'll probably be something from Songfight, seeing as how there's a whole bunch of weirdly not-quite-conforming files from not-quite-conforming encoders which people tend to submit, not to mention weird corner case stuff like odd-format album artwork and other WTFery.

I also have a lot of mp3s which have strange, non-UTF-8 foreign character titles, which is also really annoying because one of them always makes iTunes put up a warning that it "can't be played on this iPod" but of course I have no way of actually entering the name because it's a bunch of nonprintable characters, and the few characters which are printable (due to being digraphs) are handled strangely by the iTunes search stuff. Of course there's no copy-paste from dialog boxes in OSX. Meh.

Whatever the problem with whatever mp3 this is, though, it's not something which makes the iPod 3G die.

I bet it's probably just something weird with an id3 tag which is in turn causing the catalog file to get generated in a way which makes the iPod choke. It's probably some stupid malformed UTF8 string somewhere, or something similarly stupid. Whatever it is, it's going to be a pain in the ass to track down, but once I do I can send it to Apple and they can be all like "oh fluffy you're so smart, thank you for finding this bug for us!" er wait I mean not ever respond to my emails, tech support issues, or anything else, and might or might not even look into it.

Also, man, USB 2.0 might have more peak throughput than FireWire 400, but damn does it sync a hell of a lot slower on my Mini. Why'd you have to remove the FireWire circuitry from the iPod, Apple?

Comments

#7061 02/17/2006 09:22 pm
Surprise! It was something starting with a B!

Maybe a Beatmania soundtrack? A lot of those have badly-encoded titles...
#7062 02/17/2006 09:31 pm
Something beginning with 'Be'. So yeah, probably a Beatmania thing. But now I am going to be very clever and make manually-managed playlists! and this might be working. Yay?
#7063 02/17/2006 09:36 pm
FOUND IT

And yep, when I fix the id3 tag, the iPod no longer crashes(*). Yay!

/me is smart

(*) when loading that particular file on and no other files (or at least no other broken files). It looks like any file with invalid UTF8 kills the iPod at catalog-load time. I've gone and made a little program which searches all my id3 tags for high-ASCII so I can go and un-break stuff as appropriate. Whee.
#7065 02/18/2006 02:33 am
It's sort of a relief to know that I'm not the only one who has problems with wonky mp3s. My DVD/CD player is very lenient, fortunately, except that it seems to ignore files with names that are really long.
#7066 02/18/2006 08:01 am
Are you sure it's UTF-8? There are a lot of Japanese files floating around that claim to be UTF-8 but are actually SHIFT-JIS.
#7067 02/18/2006 08:34 am
Well, by 'invalid UTF8' I mean exactly that - shift-JIS, ISO-8859-1, etc. Those are all encodings which contain characters which are invalid UTF8. Smile

Older iPods gracefully handled invalid UTF8 byte streams, but apparently the new iPods have a different parser which probably validates the byte stream and then fails to actually handle the exception which gets thrown, or something. Gah.
#7068 02/18/2006 08:49 am
Hey, that's a pretty cool song.
#7069 02/18/2006 09:00 am
It's from Beatmania, like most of my not-actually-UTF8 mp3s. That was just the first one I narrowed down which was causing the problem; in the end I fixed the tags on maybe three dozen songs. Surprisingly, the hardest song to track down (which led to my long procedure in the next entry) was a Bishop Allen track, which had a stray weird bytecode which also explained why Bishop Allen showed up in my 'artists' list twice for no apparent reason.