Plaidophile

So, my iPod Nano (which I got because I got sick of the rebooting issues on my iPod 5G, which I sold to a friend) started having the reboot problems too. Instead of doing my usual horribly time-consuming process I decided to see if someone else had found a root cause.

On the WinAmp forums someone had discovered that the problem was with id3v2 tags where the comment was over 254 characters long! He also included a Perl app to find such files, but it was really badly-coded (and didn't actually work), but I rewrote it and it works great.

Big offenders: Monorail Racetrack and MC Frontalot both put their song lyrics in the comment (THERE IS A LYRIC TAG FOR A REASON!), and some mp3s I got from various zine compilations (especially WFMU On The Download) had like five paragraphs of wank about how important it was that Aphex Twin had remixed Philip Glass while thinking about doing a cover of this song about honey and so on. However, the real reason is that the iPod song database has a fixed-size comment field, which iTunes happily writes more than the max size to (which is especially funny because there's no way to actually look at the comments in the iPod to begin with).

Shame on the following:

• iTunes and iPod for assuming that comments are less than 254 characters
• iTunes for not fixing a COMM which is larger than 254 characters (it does if you open the tag and save it out again though) and just shoveling the entire tag into a field in the iPod database, causing a buffer overflow
• iPod team for NOT CHECKING YOUR BLOODY EXCEPTIONS!!!!! and putting up a meaningful error message or somehow flagging the condition to iTunes or WHATEVER